AI Is Rising and Replacing Us
In 2016, Google DeepMind AlphaGo had beaten the Go World Champion Lee Sedol, and 60 top Go professionals from China, Korea and Japan. Since Jan 1, 2017, Japan’s Fukoku Mutual Life has replaced 34 employees with IBM artificial intelligence platform Watson Explorer. It is just the beginning.
A paper published in 2013 by Oxford University researchers estimated that as many as 47% of all jobs could eventually be automated.
What Would We be Doing?
If we belong to the 47% of working population that lose jobs, what would we be doing then?
Imagine a world that you can do anything if that thing is NOT working. The obvious scenario is we would live a more eventful life, on the condition that our social system has a radical shift and everyone receives an unconditional monthly salary as a basic human right, as a way to share the fortune created by AI. Not all fortunes goes to the people who invest, build and own the AI, ordinary people who lose their jobs can live a life as well.
A Bucket list for Job-frees
We all have our bucket lists. In a world that AI works and most of us don’t need to go to office, we have lot of time. It might be a good thing.
Here is a list that I picked from someone’s bucket list, just to give you the rough idea.
1. Write a Poem
2. Write a Love Letter
3. Walk on a Nude Beach…Naked
4. Vacation with a Stranger
5. Try Pole Dancing
6. Take a Mud Bath
7. Sleep in a Treehouse
8. Ski a Black Diamond Trail
9. See the Tour de France
10. See an Opera
11. Ride on a Tandem Bike
12. Ride in a Gondola
13. Read a Classic Novel
14. Meditate
15. List 10 Things I am Grateful For Each Day
16. Learn a New Software Program
17. Kayak
18. Have my Palm Read
19. Go to Nascar
20. Go on a Safari
21. Go Heli-Skiing
22. Explore a Rain Forest
23. Eat an Insect
24. Eat a Meal Cooked by a Celebrity Chef
25. Dye My Hair a Crazy Color
26. Do a Random Act of Kindness
27. Create Food Art
28. Cook a Traditional Dish from a Different Culture
29. Climb a Lighthouse
30. Chat with friends about doing these things
We Would Chat
Everyone has a different list of things to do, but one thing is for sure, we will be talking about them with friends and people. After all, what is the point if we cannot share the things we have done, places we have traveled, accomplishments we have achieved?
Every tweet, every update, and every Instagram photo tells a mini story. By telling these stories we give our life a meaning, a purpose, significance.
We Chat with People
Some think that in future we will be closer with AI than other people. A 2014 sci-fi movieHerhas told a story that a man fall in love with an AI with the voice of Scarlet Johansson, share conversation with her, be best friend with her, and has sex with her.
But I doubt that it won’t be long before we realize how much we miss our flawed but “real” human companions.
Shylock the Merchant of Venice said:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.
- The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
Exactly.
Some people might consider that Shylock is a terrible human being, but we must agree he is also a real person. In a world that we live with AI and robots, sometimes we would rather talk with a terrible person but real like Shylock than AI, because he can feel joy, angry, sad and hope like us.
A robot never die, never get hurt, never get scared, never feel sad and lonely, how could we talk with it about our own fear, sadness, joy and hope? (Those are the things we share with other people.) We talk about these things with another person because that they can understand what we are going through.
It makes our existence so much warmer in the cold, dark, vast Universe.