AI - The Next Outsourcing Frontier
"Hold everything in your hands lightly. Otherwise, it hurts when God pries your fingers open." - Corrie Ten Boom
James Somers has penned an interesting, if lengthy piece in The New Yorker: A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. If your job involves writing code instructions for what you want computers to do, the principle take-aways from his narrative are:
If your job is to take a set of requirements and transform them into something a computer can understand - bossperson says "Take this and write stuff that make a computer do it." - then your job is probably in jeopardy.
If your job is to determine the requirements and design of a software product and then work with an AI coding machine that codes the product, you're probably on the cutting edge of something new.
The latter has a remarkable resemblance to pair programming, albeit with a strikingly different set of skills on the part of the human than one would bring to a pair programming effort with two human beings. Given the speed at which AI-driven software development is evolving and the inertia built into the average human's career development, it's likely there are an unfortunately large number of tech-types poised to enter the work force as "coders" who will find scant few jobs for their skills. "What languages do you code in?" will have been replaced with "Which AI machines have you worked with before?" Whiteboard coding challenges in interviews will be replaced with demonstrations of query abilities in front of the company's actual AI machine.
Somers refers to this partnership as a "centaur," although it's not clear which half is the "brain" and which half is the "animal." Either way, the metaphor of a centaur isn't comforting, what with the combining of two untamed natures into one being and all. What crazy beast might result from such an unholy alliance between human and AI? Many of the big brains behind the development of AI can't seem to help themselves from either spinning images of future doom or utopia. The millions of lesser minions busy writing code to optimize the human out of everything, clever though they may be, are much less concerned with where this all ends up and much more interested in the size of their paychecks and perk packages.
And therein lies the rub regarding the direction of AI. Lots of talk about how AI will make our lives easier, about all the things it will take off our plate of concerns, but scarcely little about what AI will add to our lives. "More time for leisure!", we're promised. But it appears we're not built for leisure. In fact, given idle time lacking meaningful challenge, we turn into solipsistic vulnerable narcissists and create crisis and threat to feed our survival-seeking neurology and cognitive programming. Declaring hundreds of thousands of years of baked-in evolutionary programming a "social construct" doesn't change our wetware any more than declaring a house a "boat" will make it safe from floods.
So I've been thinking, then, what are the ways AI can become a force multiplier? How might we use AI to position challenges in a way that enhances our lives by adding meaning and purpose? I've captured a few things by casting a wide net with "What can we outsource to AI?"
Coding, is one example. We're already at a point where those of us who code for a living are outsourcing to AI the tasks at the margin of our coding efforts. In much the same way as Somers describes, I've been leveraging AI to resolve the minutia faster than I can. When a Google search for how to leverage billboardjs in a particular way didn't come up on the first search result page, I asked phind.com to write a script that does what I want. I had the correct answer in seconds. As a pair to my programming, AI got me to a better final product in less time. In the end, that's all I care about. I have the program I need and I'm off to solve more interesting problems sooner rather than later. Experiences like this make it clear the unrelenting diffusion of AI's role into increasingly complex solutions is inevitable.
We can outsource our immune system to AI, as another example. AI driven programs have been showing amazing progress in their ability to identify abnormalities from medical imaging, such as x-rays and MRI's. Beyond just the presence or absence of problems, they can add nuanced interpretations, evaluate degrees of uncertainty, and suggest additional courses of action. It's possible, when combined with increasingly sensitive biometric sensors and broader data analysis, we'll be able to diagnose and treat diseases long before we have to deal with the pain or long-term disability.
In each of these examples, AI gets us past the thick goop of dealing with the kinds of things that often filled entire days just a few years ago. So now that this is possible, the question becomes "What do we do with the newly available mind space?" I believe this will take deliberate action and the development of skills the vast majority of people don't have. Absent that, the void will be filled by someone else. Our purpose and what we decide is meaningful will be optimized by others. I think this is already happening.
"Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system." - Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please use the comments section or email me directly.
Photo by Kevin Noble on Unsplash