Dubai - Governments should focus on education and job training
Published: Tue 14 Feb 2017, 3:02 PM
Last updated: Tue 14 Feb 2017, 5:15 PM
Governments need to prepare their people for an age in which disruptive technologies - such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation - change the labor market and in some cases take jobs currently done by human beings, according to experts speaking at the World Government Summit.
Jonathan Matus, the Founder and CEO of Zendrive, a company that uses data to monitor driver behaviour, noted that AI has already made its way into people's daily lives.
"Vertical AI is the intelligence that suggests which restaurant you should go to, what news stories you should read and where you should fly next based on your interests, while general AI or super-intelligence is a self-driving car or a robot that thinks for itself," he said.
Many jobs, Matus noted, might be eliminated by automation. In the US, for example, three and a half percent of US citizens mention driving as part of their job.
"This is an area where we can make an important distinction. Driving on the highway is much easier than driving in the city. So, the autonomy of driving in trucks can come faster. Instead of building trucks that will drive all the way from the warehouse to the destination, companies can use autonomy for highways and a human driver within the city," he said. "Conglomerates such as Walmart will embrace this, and in the next seven years, robots will drive a massive number of miles."
On Monday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he believes that "almost all cars built will be capable of full autonomy in 10 years."
"That's going to happen much faster than people realise. It's going to be a great convenience, but there are many people whose job it is to drive," he said. "It will all be very disruptive and very quick. That disruption I'm talking about will take place over 20 years."
Digital super intelligence, Musk noted, will "be like an alien" when compared to human beings.
To counteract the disruption of the job market, some WGS speakers - such as Elizabeth Rhodes of Y Combinator - advocated for the implementation of a basic universal income.
"The idea to give people a basic income as one of their human rights has always existed and is considered as a great measure to curtail crime," she said in a video-teleconference to the summit. "When machines replace jobs, there will be a real cost to educating people and filling the deficit of lost wages."
But not everyone is convinced.
Cade Metz, a WIRED magazine journalist who specializes in AI, said that a better option would be to teach humans to work with AI, rather than sit back and be replaced by it.
"If we just give people money unconditionally, it can go two ways - either they will give back to society through creating something new or just while away their time playing video games," he said.
"To avoid the latter, governments should focus on education and job training. While we still do not know how many jobs will be affected, we can prepare citizens to work with AI better to strike a balance."
bernd@khaleejtimes.com
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