“The Professor Podcast” host Mae Macfarlane talks with Dr. Manjeet Rege about artificial intelligence, the responsibilities that come with it, and its future in the workplace.
Q. How does one learn to become an AI practitioner?
A. Things have changed rapidly in the past 10-12 years. If you look back maybe 15 years ago, in order to become an AI practitioner, you had to go through a long, rigorous curriculum ... Now with cloud computing, you have so much computer power at your disposal, you can go to any of the cloud providers. Just like any technology that develops, it becomes more and more accessible.
Q. What is the impact of AI on jobs?
A. One of the misconceptions people have about AI is that ‘AI is out to replace humans,’ and that we are trying to create artificial intelligence that will replace human intelligence, and that is not the case. In spite of that, if you look at what a human can do and what an AI can do, there is a big difference. A human intelligence is what we call a ‘generalized intelligence,’ and what the AI field has advanced to is what we call ‘narrow intelligence.’ ... Speaking of jobs, if one has to replace a human, they need to have generalized intelligence. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. If you look at the entire number of jobs that will be created by AI and the number of jobs that will be lost, and there are a number of studies that say that by 2030, 2035, overall you will have more jobs created compared to the number of jobs that are lost.
