Let the machines do the routine and brute work, we think. Sounds like a reasonable argument. But machines are not capable of replacing humans in every aspect of work. In some cases (like fighting Covid19, it will be nice if machines can completely take over, but they can’t). They can do parts, but not the whole.
The trick is in figuring out the division of labor between the man and the machine. A consensus (for now) seems to be that certain tasks may be automated but and not jobs. We can start with that assumption.
This week I read two articles which talk about this topic.
Working smarter describes what machines are good at and where humans excel. The author recommends personal knowledge mastery as a way to stay ahead of machines using human capabilities like sharing, and network connections.
“There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sense-making, cooperation, and novel thinking.”
Working smarter
In 2017, the researchers in DeepMind created AlphaZero, a single program that masters three distinct board games: chess, shogi and Go. To be fair, AlphaZero isn’t the first algorithm created that can beat human in a board game. However, it is the first model that can master three games at the same time, with the performance far better than professional human players as well as all algorithms existed at that time. As a matter of fact, AlphaZero is not only good at these games. People who have witnessed it played described that the deep reinforcement learning algorithm was “toying” with its opponents, “tricking” them, even making one of them (i.e., Stockfish) crashed during the game. This leads some of them to believe that AlphaZero is insightful, and it has actually “understood” the nature of chess, shogi and Go.
Consciousness – An obstacle to the understanding of intelligence.
Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between intelligence and the perception of intelligence.