Will AI take over our jobs?

Last week, I attended an event about The Future of Humanity with Michio Kaku.

It was so refreshing to listen to a talk that, for a change, presented a positive vision for the future.

Among other things, he talked about how AI is transforming the way in which many of us work, but also spoke about why it won’t replace people and leave large masses of professionals out of a job.

Although AI is becoming increasingly impressive commercially in terms of helping with more and more kinds of tasks, the underlying technology has actually not changed fundamentally.

It’s existed long before OpenAI released it in the form of a chatbot.

A big part of the reason why today it’s able to help with more and more kinds of tasks is because of the huge sums of money and resources (numbering in $ billions) that are being poured into training those models to get better. Companies like OpenAI, Meta, etc, are also getting better at training the models.

They can write increasingly better text, analyze documents, generate images, audio and video, help with code reviews etc, but they still can’t reason like a person can. They can only do exactly what they are told to do (with varying degrees of success).

Until such a time when the underlying technology behind AI changes fundamentally, it’s not going to gain the ability to reason, adapt and make decisions the way a human can - no matter how many $ billions are poured into training it.

With that being said, AI is a great productivity enhancer - but that’s all it is. Using it enables us to do parts of our work faster, more efficiently and in some cases better, but it still needs a human behind the wheel. That’s a good reason to use it, but not a very good reason to worry that it will take our jobs.

Case in point: it created a very nice image for this newsletter - but it didn’t write it.

Until next week,

Cata