Steve Jobs Explains Why AI Won’t Take Away Jobs

Jobs talks about the evolution of the personal computer. In the beginning of the personal computing revolution, few people had the programming skills to use a computer. In fact, experts needed to set up computers for end users. Programs were basic, with user interfaces that would seem very non-user friendly by today’s standards. He saw all of this as a “barrier” to overcome, for both people and the industry, because this kept the power of computing in the hands of a few. Remember, this video took place back in 1980.

“Right now if you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we [the computer industry] immediately throw a big problem right in the middle of you and your problem, which is learning how to use the computer. Right? Substantial problem to overcome. Once you overcome that, it’s a phenomenal tool. But there is a barrier of having to overcome that problem.”

Today, the drawing insight from data analysis faces the same barrier. Those with the knowledge and tools to draw insight from data is limited to data scientists or others in similar job descriptions. As data volumes continue to grow as does the need for data-supported decisions, relying on a few to analyze data can be detrimental to a business. More and more companies are looking to adopt tools that incorporate the company’s best business practices while enabling non-technical users to analyze complex data sets instantaneously.

Steve Job’s vision was that anyone should be able to setup and use a PC, and I believe that the future of AI tools are the same. Systems will be self-service, easy to use, and will make complex data accessible to anyone in real-time. Jobs said that “something special happens with one computer and one user.” He was referring to the way in which software can amplify human ability. Again, although the speech was in the 1980s, Jobs could easily have been speaking about today with the growth in smart machines, which are able to dialog, reason and explain, all with the goal of boosting human performance.

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Quote of the Day

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

- Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

What Would Happen If Humans Disappeared?

Quote of the Day

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

- Muhammad Ali

Quote of the Day

On a sunny clear day, you can improve your body; on a rainy fogy day, you can improve your mind!

- Mehmet Murat ildan

Wisdom Of The Week

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.

This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958), in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’. Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.

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The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

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Quote of the Day

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? There are no limits to our greed, none to our cruelty. And as long as such crimes are committed by stealth and by individuals, they are less harmful and less portentous; but cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual. Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out. Man, naturally the gentlest class of being, is not ashamed to revel in the blood of others, to wage war, and to entrust the waging of war to his sons, when even dumb beasts and wild beasts keep the peace with one another. Against this overmastering and widespread madness philosophy has become a matter of greater effort, and has taken on strength in proportion to the strength which is gained by the opposition forces.

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Quote of the Day

What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer.

- William Albert Allard

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

In the Hindu religion, one can[not] have freedom of speech. A Hindu must surrender his freedom of speech. He must act according to the Vedas. If the Vedas do not support the actions, instructions must be sought from the Smritis, and if the Smritis fail to provide any such instructions, he must follow in the footsteps of the great men.

He is not supposed to reason. Hence, so long as you are in the Hindu religion, you cannot expect to have freedom of thought.

- B.R. Ambedkar