which future are you getting ready for?

the future is an ever shifting goal post and aiming to land the ball into that highly unpredictable target is akin to gambling… it would be infinitely better to focus on playing than worrying about the scoring… scoring will happen once your game improves and your game will improve only through focusing on the many variables like fitness, clarity of thought, strength, perception of the opponent, grit, developing sportsmanship… essentially no one scores by just focusing on the net theres a lot more that goes into it sometimes also the hand of God.

Artificial Intelligence, that mother of all fuck ups that’s just waiting to gobble up humanity, can now code. So much for bunty and babloo attending coding classes. Fifteen years back who knew there would be a virus that would lay mans best laid plans to waste, and how. Fifteen years hence who knows how much more refined the coding AIs would become. My belief is that coding as a skill for humans will become redundant in a period of under ten years! AIs that can actually code, not one but multiple, have been already developed and are undergoing refinement even as of right now. Within a space of fifteen years we went from image barometer to Cambridge Analytica. IB, now discontinued, was a rudimentary tool I had helped write back in 2005, it crawled search engines to do public sentiment analysis and opinion mining. It was extensively used by Mosanto as well as Syngenta, at that time more so as a positioning/marketing tool. Cambridge Analytica is best known as the data analytics tsunami that hit elections worldwide and foisted upon us leaders like Trump and closer home he who shall not be named.

It is not unfathomable that ten years down the line computers would be the ones running the show as far as commissioning, designing, prototyping, sanctioning, developing, testing, optimizing and then eventually maintaining code is concerned, with zero interference from humans. Fifteen years down the line they would be the ones attending conferences, presenting papers and hawking freebee virtual tee shirts that say “Data is the business” or “When life gives you data, make clusters“… Humans would not be required for this job anymore, if anything they would be too slow for the machines.

So yeah be very careful what goal post you’re headed for, as I see it the coding goal post is all but gone. Math, Science all those objective structured streams, the STEM streams had their day in the sun. Going forward, for children who are in their preteens and younger, coding and specifically math needs to be not encouraged as much as the arts. The machines are great at logic, mathematics, referencing and being generally smarter than humans because they do not have the baggage of emotions which results in decisions that are swift, purely clinical and precise. Who needs vacillating humans who are doing all the calculations about probable loss of life when an AI can do the calculations based upon game theory and launch missiles in the fraction of a second thereby preventing more massive destruction.

So where is the future for humans? Well, when it comes to understanding emotions the machines will probably never be able to parallel humans. Because emotions are fickle. One person may find the Mona Lisa beautiful, another may find her grumpy, a third might feel like she’s anaemic, a fourth might actually wonder why anyone would paint such a monstrosity, a fifth may feel she could’ve smiled a little more, a sixth could wonder… good luck teaching an AI how to take all these subjective emotions and appreciate art. Yes there are AIs that are doing art now however there’s a long long way to go and with art the amazingly huge advantage humans have over machines is that art evolves, scientific rules, maths does not… gravity wont reverse in a million years. So art is the moving goalpost for AI and by the time AI thinks that it has gotten good at understanding art the seasons would have changed and with the seasons the flavours, fashions, colors and public sentiments would have moved on to a new “thing”. Good luck playing catchup AI…. how’d you like that!

So yeah focus on living, building potential in the field of being humans and not turning into calculators/encyclopedias/journals/thesaurus those jobs the AIs will have completely taken over by 2030-35. (no not even a surgeon, that too is long gone)…

makes me wonder how far away are we from a hypothetical situation where one AI is trained to read body parameters of a patient and inject drugs in a controlled manner into said patient (insulin patches for instance) and another AI that is designed to process insurance offerings to individuals goes rogue and takes over the insulin patch to bump off patients to optimize insurance payouts… (yeah Robin Cook has written this already go read)