As promised, I’ll be posting slides and commentary from my recent user-group presentation on AI (Boston Code Camp). One of my first slides talked about the near-term evolution of AI, defined as either 1-2 years or 6 months, depending on who you believe.
I divided the slide into two parts: good news and bad. The good news is the promise of enormously increased productivity, which may well lead to a higher standard of living across the board. Further, as AI progresses, we may see accelerated breakthroughs in many fields, most notably medicine and genetics.
The bad news is that along with these changes will almost certainly come massive displacement. As a society, we’ve seen this kind of displacement before. The advent of the tractor displaced well over 50% of farm workers, and ultimately mechanization displaced over 95% of agricultural labor!
The key difference, however, is that in the past technology displaced the least skilled workers; AI is set to affect many of the most educated and skilled. I’m not sure that society knows how to handle this. Reskilling has a poor performance history, and sending highly paid college-educated programmers back to two-year training programs in robotics does not seem auspicious.
In the very short term, AI presents some real challenges, not least is the environmental impact of massive energy-consuming data centers. Add to that the potential economic impact when the AI boom goes bust and there is plenty to worry about, but here is one more…
Right now we are learning to adjust to AI, but research continues on AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The next step after that is Artificial Super Intelligence: when AI becomes meaningfully smarter than humans. No one knows quite what to expect when that happens, but I commend to you the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. These are not crackpot writers — they are recognized experts in AI and their thesis is chilling.
In coming postings I will divide my attention between two aspects of AI:
- Using AI in developing your application
- Creating applications that incorporate AI
Along the way I will talk about AI in the .NET world (specifically the Azure workflow tools) and outside of .NET (time to brush up on Python).
Next up: Assisted Coding…
