In 1992, as a child, on an educational TV channel, sitting in Pakistan, I heard a smart guy saying that in 10 years there will two kinds of people who has jobs and who do not have jobs. And people who have jobs will know how to use computer at different degrees. And he was right. There was no fear that people will lose jobs, and there will be less jobs.
There was a period people lost a lot of jobs, and new people took it, and people trained and took them back. Computer institutes popped everywhere. I saw my first computer same year, and a year later computer was introduced in curriculum of my school.
Andrew Ng famous quote that AI is new electricity is what I have found to be true in every facet of life to date.
Like I am not writing. I am just dictating this article. My development team asked for more developers about a year back, and I introduced Cursor AI, and I think we have few extra software engineers in my engineering team of 21 plus now.
Listen, AI is not there to take away your jobs, as long as you are high skilled, and can use AI to your advantage.
Yes, there will be time of transition, which will be painful, and has already started. And probably coincide with economic downturn, and government and media will need someone to blame, if not immigrants, they will turn their guns to AI. Oh… AI is responsible.
No, Mr. President, years of not investing in right education, financialization of economy, and bad big corporate decision-making is. For example, last month, Verizon laid off 13000 employees. It is not due to AI. It is years of bad decision making by top executives, not able to grow in different markets, and outsourcing jobs in India.
Verizon has no customers and no business in India, but it has a big office in Bangalore, India, where they are hiring frantically. The same goes for AT&T and others. While Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have large campuses, they also have businesses in India, even though a large number of employees there work for U.S. markets.
AI will replace jobs like warehouse, may be taxi drivers, but even 50 percent of Taxi markets going to self-driving will take another 10 to 15 years. AI introduces tremendous efficiencies, and removes huge number of clerical jobs, and reduce labor intensive work.
But thing about opportunities. Whole restaurant industry will transform, and there will be restaurant robots’ technicians, installers, maintenance, and operators’ jobs will come to exist, and proliferate. Besides dealers, whole sellers, etc, and for other industries like manufacturing will see more and more AI automation from printing to packing, and such technology will be more available to small scale manufacturers. Resulting in cheaper production costs.
At the turn of last century, in 1901, the biggest industry was Whale Oil Industry, and there were millions of horse carriages, and next 20 years both largely vanished.
Moving from typewriters to personal computers made us enormously more prosperous, as a lot of intelligence went from human brains to computers, but it freed up human brain to do bigger and better things, and which God designed it for. No matter what technology, and which era. Human brain has superseded all for millions of years, and in this era of intelligence it will remain same, till we use it appropriately for education of our children, but that is topic of another day.
Now this Hoax of Artificial General Intelligence AGI being sold every day by some huge names in the industry. Remember, every single word which comes out of Elon Musk and Sam Altman is objected towards increasing stock prices, and evaluations of their companies, and not actual what will happen. If what they said was true, we all would be not driving, and having Level 5 completely self-driving cars 15 years ago. But every year it is 5 years away, as per Elon Musk.
We will get there, but AI alone will not get us to Level 5 completely autonomous self-driving cars. Other connectivity technologies, like 5G and inter car communication protocols, will need to be developed and adapted. There is a hegemony fight going on that space, and is topic for another day.
There is no standard definition for AGI. It is a huge buzzword, and for common man it means an AI system which is better than every single in every single discipline, be it medical surgeon, architect, software programmers, product managers, painters, etc.
I wrote an article about how in my opinion it is impossible to mimic human brain, considering most basic kind of one neuron in human brain can be represented by about 400 transistors in GPU approximately. We hardly have any understanding of all kinds of neuron in human brain, and there are about 100 billion neurons in a human brain. NVIDIA best GPU Blackwell B200, which is basically two GPUs connected on a 10 TB/s, has 208 billion transistors, and we need by this method about 40,000 billion transistors GPU missing by only about 200 times.
I know this is oversimplification, but it is hard to argue to mimic AGI there is another better method to calculate. Quantum may be the answer, but both transistors and Quantum bits are hard tech problems, and currently both do not provide any roadmap to reach AGI, and still waiting for scientific breakthrough.
So, there is no problem. Stop fearing and start using AI.
