There are many laws that guide us, irrespective of whether we are aware of it or not. Some are what we make and others are part of nature. No one is averse from the effects of its ruling. We always try to resist any change, but the changes will catch up with you. It will come with many resets, overriding existing practices and conventions.
It’s time for the next big reset in technology that has already started with advancement in
Artificial Intelligence (AI). If it was the dot com 25 years back its time for the next cycle in
technological transformation. When the dot com offered us a whole new experience with the internet, social media, digital transformation and automations, it wiped out a few traditional industries.
The new AI age will offer new applications that can be superior in its creative
output, precise reasoning capabilities, and massive analytical summarizations. These are
perhaps the established human capabilities we exhibit. All put together it will challenge many of our established conventions. This will be done with great speed, high precision and
utmost clarity. It’s going to be the age of AI.
Human intellect is measured with how much knowledge we possess and the depth of its
analytical capacity. Information or data or knowledge has already become cheap and easily
available with the spread of the internet. Which means the first level of human competency
has already become less relevant.
With knowledge we generally summarize and use it to invent new forms of creativity. This competency for invention depends on how fast and precise we use knowledge. As we know, AI uses massive amounts of data and gives outputs with the highest level of creative reasoning that puts all the collective human intellect to shame. Welcome to the world of AI.
I believe all that happens in nature follows certain patterns and laws.
I would say the patterns are in a way infinite, and that the natural laws are so enormous it's beyond our comprehension. With the advancement in AI competency we should be able to decipher many of these patterns and find new original discoveries. However we need people to work aside with AI and build the right kind of models to work with the right kind of data. We are part of many cycles that advance with each time period. And this is one such cycle that ends in the technology world with the advancement in AI. The start of the new cycle will witness many that go into oblivion; be it industries, jobs, people or even applications that were considered essentials.
The previous cycle will preserve the top 2% that will play an important role in the new AI world. The rest can only play around in support roles. The top 2% contribute to the core AI developments, while the rest will use the applications that evolve with the AI. Before the start of the dotcom revolution there was a reset that happened after the ‘dot com bubble’. This is yet to happen with AI. With the capability to learn patterns of huge amounts of data and the capacity to reason with it has made AI a superior intellect. The reasoning capability is beyond human capacity which makes us feel AI is real intelligence.
There will be applications that evolve which can predict patterns from the vast amount of
dataset. This can be in astrology, predicting earthquakes, diagnosis etc. In fact all what we
do are outcomes of pattern seeking.
The Engineers will take up the role of clerks who will only be required to validate the outputs from AI applications. The scale of teams would be reduced to the level of 30% in the first stage. Once AI becomes full swing in the IT industry only 10% of the existing work force is needed. The first stage is yet to happen in many companies.
The IT industry may require few architects, leads and very few to manage in product developments and testing. Automation will become more sophisticated and the role of manual testing will diminish. We are only two decades old in using social media and digital technology, which has brought the whole world at your finger tips. We were smart enough to use the mobile, computers and internet in combination for creating applications for this digital advancement.
The new AI will test human innovation not in terms of human competency but how we use AI competency for the next level of sophisticated creations. The AI story is part of our civilizational advancement like any time in the past. Some of the essentials will get wiped out and new forms will get established. It’s high time we understand our role in the new AI cycle and prepare for it.
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