Since the beginning of robots or AI (artificial intelligence), there has always been a worry of them having a mind of their own and taking over human life. Well, not quite that bad but robots may be taking over a key component to our lives, work. Not just manual labor either, AI is constantly growing and getting stronger. Of course the whole point in creating such technologies was to make our lives easier, but now there is a worry that these time-saving technologies could and have developed enough that they could take millions of jobs. A man by the name of Kai-Fu Lee who is a massive techy in China is also the founder of a venture capitalist firm called Sinovation, was interviewed by CNBC (CNBC). In the interview we see it obvious that Kai-Fu Lee is a massive believer in the fact that AI will confiscate many jobs, “These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50 percent of human jobs,” (CNBC). Lee believes this new age of artificial intelligence will be a huge impact on all of human life. In my opinion, I don’t believe we should be giving away our jobs to AI, and I do not believe 50% of humans out of jobs is beneficial for a working society, although that is not how Kai-Fu Lee feels. Later on in his previous quote he continues his stance, “[AI will] create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty,” (CNBC). Now, I am sure that his argument would be much stronger than my own and most definitely has more ethos, though my main point of confusion in all of this is are people still remembering we are human. If we let AI take us too far we become the machine.

 

Our reliance on AI will turn into the machine and humans switching roles, we will be powerless. Although that conclusion of a future timeline might be a tad far fetched, it is something that is not impossible with the capable technologies that we hold today. In fact, according to CNBC, Kai-Fu Lee believes that this initial 50% job takeover that I mentioned previously has the possibility of occurring in the next 10 years. I think it is also crucial that we look into companies abroad, especially in a China or Japan, and see how far they have come with the super advanced AI and analyze its benefits. Lee even mentioned in his interview that his venture capitalist firm has invested in companies that have the capability to “recognizing three million faces at a time” and “dispersing loans in eight seconds,” (CNBC). It is quite clear that a new and stronger age of artificial intelligence is coming, and although experts may believe otherwise, I believe that we must still remain precautious. It is really quite outstanding how far AI has come and how much it is projected to achieve, though sometimes with technologies this strong, we do not know what could go wrong.

 

Works Cited:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/kai-fu-lee-robots-will-replace-half-of-all-jobs.html