In a highly optimistic forecast at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, computer scientist Sebastian Thrun said artificial intelligence will radically reshape our lives for the better.
"In the last 200 or 300 years, we have made ourselves into superhumans," able to plow a field a thousand times faster than our ancestors, fly across the Atlantic Ocean and talk to a person in Australia, he said. Artificial intelligence will take us to the next step: "Rather than replacing our muscles, we're going to be making our brains stronger."
That'll start with artificially intelligent cars, said Thrun, who rose to Silicon Valley fame in his former job leading Google's self-driving car project.
"All the unborn cars get born with the full wisdom of their forefathers. AI cars will outpace all of us because they can learn faster," said Thrun, still a Stanford professor and now president of online learning site Udacity.
Artificial intelligence is spreading like wildfire across the technology industry, screening out junk email, labeling our photos, translating foreign languages and helping us type faster. But not everybody is so sanguine about the possibility of AI machines taking over high-skilled jobs.
One worrywart is President Barack Obama, who fretted this month that AI could push people out of work -- but not create replacement jobs, unlike earlier technology revolutions.
Obama's pessimism tinges his generally sunny outlook about AI. But Thrun's optimism is unalloyed.
Seventy-five percent of us in offices do mindless work. The good news that 75 percent of us will be freed from that mindless work," Thrun said. "In the history of humanity, every time a shift like this happened, we became better human beings. The experiences and culture we built so were much more valuable because we all stopped working on farms.
Source - cnet
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