The Rise of Human-Level Intelligence
We are on the cusp of a tech-based societal transformation that will be at least as big as that of the Industrial Revolution. This isn’t just machine-driven automation for tedious manual labor. We’re talking about man-made creations that can “think” at a human level – or even beyond.
To be fair, that second-wave revolution won’t actually be here for quite some time. Optimistic projections put that kind of breakthrough in the 2040s or 2050s while more conservative models predict the 2080s or 2090s. So, we have anywhere from a few decades to close to a century.
But when you look at the advancements made in the past few years, it’s hard not to get excited over the possibilities. A few decades might seem far away, but that time is going to zip on by and the breakthrough will arrive before you know it.
For example,
driverless cars are on the horizon. It’s not as sexy an idea as, say, hoverboards or flying cars, but it’ll still have an enormous impact on the way we live our lives and conduct commerce. Driverless cars aren’t generally intelligent in the same way that people are, but driving is a big, complicated, subtle cognitive task which is quickly moving into the reach of robots, and that’s a sign of things to come.
It’s not even necessarily clear that traditionally intellectual jobs are safe. Even in the near future, machines like IBM’s Watson system that famously won on Jeopardy may take over data-heavy jobs like doctor and lawyer, thanks to their ability to consume and integrate far more information than humans. In fact, traditionally intellectual jobs may be among the first to go. Ironically, some of the tasks we think of requiring enormous intelligence (like those that depend on an enormous amount of domain knowledge) are proving much easier for machines than relatively basic tasks like cleaning a house or making a burger.
