Marc Andreessen famously stated “software is eating the world“, and very few doubted him on that. But I think there is a new king in town: Artificial Intelligence.
Every day we are hearing of amazing new applications of AI (check out Business Insider’s cool list here) that are slowly changing the world, or sometimes quite rapidly. More recently, Google has been able to turn those low-quality Street View images from Google Maps and make them beautiful, all using AI with no human interaction.
As always with new, revolutionary technologies, we have the constant fear that our jobs we’ll be replaced by that technology. It’s no different with AI. AI will kill the need for humans in some blue- and white-collar jobs, and hopefully be starting with the dull and dangerous jobs. My sincere hope is that AI will do a number of things for the human race:
- Increase our life span by taking over the aforementioned dangerous jobs such as mining, adding more safety automation into our lives such as autonomous vehicles, and help provide more accurate diagnosis of diseases earlier and even assist in determining leading indicators of potential diseases.
- Lower the overall cost of living as machines are more efficient, and so the cost of creating goods and services should decrease. AI can also help us be effective agriculture-wise to help increase harvest sizes and decrease waste.
- Allow humans to spend more time not working in two ways: take over the mundane aspects of our jobs (the “dull” components) and assist us in our work helping us make better decisions, produce higher-quality work, and thus allowing us to go home sooner.
Out of those three above, I think #3 will directly show those worried about AI’s impact on our jobs that AI is more useful than dangerous, and it’s designed for your benefit. Eric Schmidt recently shared the same sentiment when he mentioned a McKinsey study stating that 90% of jobs are not fully automatable, meaning AI will be there to help, not replace.
(I couldn’t find the mentioned McKinsey study with that particular fact, but this could have been it)
So how can AI help me as a Product Manager go home sooner?