AI in the 21st Century per Noah Harari

International writer Yual Noah Harari, best selling author of Saipens and Homo Deus and Barack Obama favorite, says, “there are three big challenges facing humankind in the 21st century. They are: nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption, especially the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and bioengineering. These will change the world more than anything else.”  In his latest book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, Harari argues technology is humanity’s biggest challenge. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.

Let’s start with jobs and incomes, because whatever liberal democracy’s philosophical appeal, it has gained strength in no small part thanks to a practical advantage: The decentralized approach to decision making that is characteristic of liberalism—in both politics and economics—has allowed liberal democracies to outcompete other states, and to deliver rising affluence to their people.

Most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.

Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators—not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72—it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours.

What’s more, AI enjoys uniquely nonhuman abilities, which makes the difference between AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive, and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won’t really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide will therefore be far smaller.

Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.

All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.  Only one skill will endure through a career, that of entrepreneurship.

EDITOR: Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults.  Skills will come and go, but one that can be trained and learned is entrepreneurship.  Entrepreneurship can save the world IF larger-scale education begins NOW everywhere -K12, career resources, economic development bodies, colleges/trade schools, and new re-training centers.  Only entrepreneurship gives hope, rekindles passion, develops initiative, builds leadership, and provides opportunities for displaced workers (to create their own jobs).  Thanks to Silicon Valley startups in the first decades of the 21st century, we have a startup method that reduces risk and doubles  success.  It is evidenced-based or lean startup entrepreneurship.  Before scaling or spending capital, an idea or concept is validated by the customer and agile engineering procedures. Educators must wake-up, see the AI-GIG train coming, and institute new entrepreneurial training as quickly as possible.  Time is running out!  See clintoneday.com/eri-education/.

More at – https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/  and    https://www.amazon.com/Yuval-Noah-Harari/e/B00J21BCIW/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1.