In a few decades, artificial intelligence will surpass us in many areas that we consider special to ourselves. This is a big challenge for our era, says researcher Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, who may demand an "irrational" response. In early 2017, one of the most important news in the United States did not come from the White House or even from Donald Trump's Twitter. No, it was hidden in a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and posted on its website.
It detailed the efforts of Google (or more accurately, its subsidiary Waymo) to implement autonomous vehicles. According to the report, Google's self-driving cars traveled 1,023,330 kilometers in 2016 and required human intervention 124 times. That's one intervention for every 8,047 kilometers of self-driving. What's even more impressive is the progress made in just one year: human intervention has dropped from 0.8 times a thousand miles to 0.2, which translates to a 400% improvement. With this progress, Google cars will easily surpass any driver's personal skills by the end of this year.
Driving was once considered a purely human skill. But we said the same about chess. And now the computer beats the world chess champion many times. The strategic board game go took over from chess the title of litmus test of human thinking. In 2016, the computer beat the world's best go player. IBM's Watson succeeded in Jeopardy - which was also considered the fiefdom of the people - and is currently working on identifying cancerous moles and making creative recipes, among other things.
Computers are conquering realms that were previously considered deeply human. That require knowledge, strategy, creativity. What does this mean for a person who turns out to be in the future?
Some fear that self-driving cars and trucks could oust millions of professional drivers (and they are right) and destroy entire industries (exactly). But it's worth worrying about children. What will be their place in a world where machines will take over from people one industry after another? What will our children do and how will they relate to these smarter machines? What will be their contribution to the world in which they live?
Our children will never be able to count faster, solve mathematical equations faster than machines. They will never type faster, drive better, fly safer. They can play chess with their friends, but because of the machines they will no longer have a chance to become the best chess player on the planet. They may still be learning different languages (as they are now), but in the future this will not make any sense or provide any competitive advantage given the latest advances in real-time machine translation.
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Actually, it all boils down to a rather simple question: what is so special about us, what is our last value? It is unlikely that these will be skills like arithmetic or typing, in which machines have already surpassed us. And this is unlikely to be rationality, since machines are devoid of all these addictions, prejudices and emotions that we have.
Perhaps we should consider qualities at the other end of the spectrum: radical creativity, irrational originality, even a dose of simple, illogical madness, rather than rigid logic. Some Kirk instead of Spock. Until now, machines have found it very difficult to emulate these qualities: insane leaps of faith, arbitrary enough for a robot to predict, not to mention mere chance. Their problem is our opportunity.
I am not suggesting that we give up reason, logic and critical thinking. In fact, precisely because we value so much the values we associate with rationality and sanity, we should value the opposite a little.
And I'm not a Luddite, but quite the opposite. You see, as we continue to improve our information-processing machines and make them adapt and learn in every interaction with the world, every bit of data that comes to them, we will soon have useful rational helpers. They will enable us to overcome some of our human limitations in translating information into rational decisions. And they will get better and better.
Therefore, we must strive to ensure that human contributions to this division of labor complement the rationality of machines, rather than compete with them. Because it will always distinguish us from them, and it is this difference that will create our value.
And if I'm right, we should foster the development of creative thinking, irrational solutions, unusual ideas. Not because irrationality is bliss, but because a dose of illogical creativity will complement the rationality of the machine. It will save us space on the evolutionary shelf.
Unfortunately, our education system is built in a completely opposite way. Like the peasants of the pre-industrial mindset, our schools and universities are lining up to produce obedient servants of rationality and develop outdated skills in dealing with obsolete machines.
If we are serious about the problem machines pose, we will have to change that, and pretty soon. Of course, we will have to learn factual rationality and how better facts lead to better decisions. We need to help our kids learn to work with the smartest of machines to improve their decision making. But most of all, we need to consider the long-term perspective: even if computers surpass us, we will remain the most creative building in the city, unless we completely suppress this aspect of humanity in ourselves.
Perhaps this is our chance to stay on the narrow path of evolution.
ILYA KHEL