On AI: We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
“AI is not even near its full potential; it’s just in its infancy. We haven’t seen anything yet. So, every 10 years, you are likely to lose your job or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of the latest machine learning wizardry. And if you want to stay in the game, you will have to basically reinvent yourself — and not just once, but repeatedly.”
“If you don’t get to know yourself better, there is somebody out there who is, right now, trying to hack you. And not just one — Amazon is trying to hack you, and Google is trying to hack you, and Coca-Cola is trying to hack you, and the Russians and the American government and the Chinese. They are all trying to hack you right now.”
“One of the dangers in the 21st century is that machine learning and artificial intelligence will make centralized systems much more efficient than distributed systems, and dictatorships might become more efficient than democracies.”
“I strongly believe that given the technologies we are now developing, within a century or two at most, our species will disappear. I don’t think that in the end of the 22nd century, the Earth will still be dominated by Homo sapiens.”
Persuasion on a Whole New Level
“What you try to do a thousand years ago with the priest preaching from the pulpit you will be able to do in a far more invasive way in 10 or 15 years with all kinds of brain-computer interfaces and direct biological interventions.
If you lose your job as a truck driver in 2030 to a self-driving vehicle and there is a new opening in designing software, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to retrain yourself as a software designer than it was to retrain yourself as a factory worker.
I think the maybe the most important thing for people to realize about living in the 21st century, as against the Middle Ages or the Stone Age, is that we are now hackable animals.
We are in a unique situation in human history when, for the first time, we have no idea what the job market will look like in 20 or 30 years. That was never before the case in history.
