Big Ideas 2019: 7 (more) big ideas on artificial intelligence
Joi from Blade Runner 2049 (publicity still courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Big Ideas 2019: 7 (more) big ideas on artificial intelligence

When I was interviewing business leaders about their Big Ideas for 2019, they each started bringing up artificial intelligence. Again and again. I could write this whole new list about only AI, I thought. So I did. The time horizon isn’t just 2019; some developments will take longer than a year, some are already with us. Here are seven (more) Big Ideas on artificial intelligence.

1. China will win the AI wars.

There are four factors to success in artificial intelligence, says Kai-fu Lee, the former president of Google China and author of “AI Superpowers” — data, tenacious entrepreneurs, strong engineers and supportive government policy. All four tip the balance toward China, according to Lee. “I think the US is still way ahead in research and technology, and also some more advanced uses of AI, such as autonomous vehicles, robotics,” he told LinkedIn editor-in-chief Dan Roth. “But assuming no major, big discoveries are made, Chinese power in implementation, and just the magnitude of data, will likely give China the edge.”

2. AI may take our jobs; it’s also starting to create them.

Six of the 15 fastest-growing jobs on LinkedIn, according to our just-released US Emerging Jobs Report, are involved in building AI: “machine learning engineer” has grown 12x since 2014, second only to blockchain developer. Data scientists also show up among the jobs with the largest hiring growth, with more than 6,000 openings currently in the US. AI professionals are not just needed where you’d expect — San Francisco and New York — but also in Austin, Denver or Madison, Wisconsin. AI skills grew 190% globally from 2015 to 2017 and are spreading beyond tech to education, finance, manufacturing or healthcare.

3. Technology used to do things for us; we’re now asking it to decide for us.

Our tools, even the most sophisticated assembly line robot, used to be just that — tools. We gave them a task to do, and they did it. But with the rapid rise of AI, we’ve entered a new age. ”Without even realizing it, we've shifted from technology doing something to technology deciding something,” says Rachel Botsman, a lecturer at Oxford’s Said Business School and the author of “Who Can You Trust?”. Technology decides what news we see or what route we take from point A to point B. “We’ve become very deferential to these things. How quickly we outsource our decision-making to machines — that's the piece that frightens me.” Botsman is focused on what it does to children growing up in this new age. She got rid of her Alexa when she found her children were asking it to make every daily decision, from what they should wear to what game to play. “They want to accelerate the process. How much does that stop us thinking?” she asks, adding that friction and skepticism are essential to knowledge-building. “If young children get so used to outsourcing their decision-making to a machine, will they have that human capability to say, ‘I don't know enough’?” There is no quick soundbite to this Big Idea, but it’s a question we will — and should — ask ourselves a lot more in the next year.

4. We will each get our own private AI.

The next step is portable AI, says Charles-Edouard Bouée, CEO of Roland Berger — an AI assistant that is always near, reliably performs complex requests, and lives in a private cloud, freeing us from intermediary platforms that collect and sell our data. It’s nothing to be feared, he argues, just “human augmented intelligence.” “For people who think about Pinocchio, it’s Jiminy Cricket; for people who think about Blade Runner 2049, it’s Joi,” he explains. ”It's the ability for all of us to be helped by artificial intelligence, to navigate our life, business and other things we are doing — but really helped by the machine rather than being remote-controlled."

5. Behind every good robot is a good human.

Like the 18th-century mechanical turk that delighted European courts with its chess skills, a “hi-tech robot” demonstrated in a youth forum in Russia this week turned out to be… a man in a robot costume. What an apt metaphor for what “artificial intelligence” still often is! Armies of low-paid contractors, known as crowd workers, stand in for imperfect AI, swoop in when it fails or train it until it can take over, from customer service chatbots to transcription or content moderation, explains Kristy Milland, an academic who has done this work for years and advocates for crowd workers. “A fair amount of stuff that we expect to be automated isn't,” she says. “There's constant human input into a lot of stuff where we think it should be a good scrape of data and you're ready to go. It's not.” Those robot trainers are not even always paid: When you identify a bicycle or a road sign in a photo to prove you’re human and log in to a site, you are actually training self-driving cars to identify obstacles on the road

6. We'll have to get serious about addressing Wikipedia’s bias.

By Jessi Hempel, senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn

Wikipedia’s governing body never intended for the website to become the chief arbiter of fact. Yet somehow, over the last decade, the site’s role has quietly shifted. Wikipedia is no longer just an amorphous collection of half-baked encyclopedia entries useful to high schoolers working on term papers. It has become a hugely influential trove of data that composes the infrastructure for many of the world’s systems. Earlier this year, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that Wikipedia would provide fact-checking for the company’s videos; Facebook shortly followed suit. But bigger than any of this is the site’s expanding role in AI. Wikipedia provides one of the most popular training sets for researchers. And that’s a problem. The website is still edited mostly by men, mostly by white men, and mostly by white men hailing overwhelmingly from the same countries (the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy.) Wikipedia’s efforts to diversify its editor population have been largely unsuccessful. Even as Wikipedia’s information is getting baked deeper into AI, so are its inaccuracies and biases.

7. We’ll love it… eventually.

The final words go to Kai-fu Lee: “In 50 years, looking back, all humans who are still alive then, we'll realize that this whole round of AI displacing jobs actually ended up being a really positive thing for humanity, because it woke all of us up to realize, repetitively doing the same job over and over again is not why we're on this earth. And perhaps we've been so foolish, after thousands of years of evolution, that our maker decided to throw AI at us and say, "Okay, you can't wake up by yourself. I'm gonna take away all those routine jobs. Now you've got more time. Now you've got more money." I mean, the whole of humanity has more money. "Now you have more choice and more freedom. Will you please do the things that you love? Love the people and spend time with them, and spend some time thinking about why humans exist, because it's not about work."

Daniel Roth, Jessi Hempel and Missy Chen contributed reporting.

What other applications or implications of AI are on your mind for 2019 and beyond? Share in the comments or post with #BigIdeas2019.

AI will have to pay SS, and Taxes, or the GOV's around the world will collapse. Then our National Debt will disapear?

Alessandro Ventre

Infra Managed Service Associate Manager at Accenture.

6 年

Exploring, or just see, the effects of AI will be surely interesting, we might have a number of new choice almost how it were some sort of unexpected and new deep learning. Neverthless, I am not agree with each point, however, in my personal and little opinion, on that basis on 3,4,5 I fully agree for sure; also the implication are many... code ethical, algorithm for spread out, how sharing the news, and so on. From some specific side'll be also funny.

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Daniel Ram

Senior Software Engineer

6 年

As long as I can get a piece of that pie, i’m good! ??

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MiaCate Kennedy I

CEO at Bannock Development Corporation

6 年

Behind every good robot is s good human. Hmmm well right now there is very poor representation of women, children, and minorities in AI. Without swift inclusion, AI cannot reach its ethical, good, or diverse potential.

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Hassan Tariq

M&A | Tokenization | A.I | Web3

6 年

Interesting and worrying insights at the same time. One thing to consider is how AI will dominate the news / publishing space over the coming years.

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