The Pervasive AI-what parents and kids need to consider

Audience: General/Parents & Kids

Preparing for an AI enabled tomorrow

As AI starts becoming a reality, it’s an imperative to ponder on what it means for each one of us and for our kids. Penning down my thoughts for a quick and easy read for parents and their kids. I see the following four considerations that deserve your attention:

1. AI will be pervasive, embrace it with it's comprehensive understanding- Whatever your profession, AI will be an integral and ubiquitous part of your lives. A doctor will use AI for pattern recognition to discern a malignant tumor from a benign one or for precision medication or for remote minimum invasive surgery. A teacher may use it for more accurate assessments, better pattern recognition and design of curriculum that focuses the right minds on the right strengths. A cab driver would use autonomous cars/vehicles to run more cars, more safely thus generating more business in the same hours they spend today. In our daily lives, AI will make our homes smarter and keep us more aware of our surroundings thereby creating a more informed and safer environment. As is the case always, the advent of this new technology will also bring with it the undesired aspects of privacy and security concerns, dark AI economy, deep fake etc. You name a profession or think of daily life around you, it will have AI embedded in it in all its flavors of good, bad or super cool. So, embrace it, know it and make it do safe and constructive things for you while still being conscious of the undeniable possibilities of its adverse applications. The future will be what you make of it!

2. Be multi-lingual - Know the AI languages and different human languages (Reference, “The Industries of the future”, Alec Ross) of regions where the possibilities for AI applications are more .AI will offer boundary less opportunities and being able to communicate far and beyond with the global audience will be a must. A doctor, for instance, would probably be required to treat a patient in a remote location in Africa or Brazil or China using a phone app enabled by AI to remotely process X-Rays/body scans/simple pics and peripheral device driven preliminary tests to interact and diagnose sitting from a remote location; let’s say in USA. This means knowing the human languages of the target countries will be a must in a much more open and connected workplace. The professionals will also be required to have a fair understanding of the ways of working of AI. Learning basics of the programming languages that AI is developed on will be required to be able to understand AI’s ways of working and rationale for doing things the way it will do tomorrow. So, learn AI languages like R, Python etc and human languages of frontier countries where the possibilities of AI applications are huge and become multi-lingual.

3. Develop multiple skills and be agile- With AI as a super assistant, professionals will have bandwidth do to more work and handle more variations in the same time that they do today. Cab drivers will probably be agile enough to understand that with AI their job is going to change to that of a domain trainer and handler for autonomous cars/vehicles thus enabling them to run and manage more vehicles and may be even look at AI driven public safety, elderly or child care services as add-ons. If AI is taking away jobs, it’s adding more in the mix. AI will be changing the nature of jobs that we do today by automating the simplistic tasks however, at the same time, it will be creating a plethora of new job opportunities like those of AI domain trainers, engineers, developers, testers, managers to list a few. Look for the changing job roles and be agile to adopt to it.

4. AI will supersede humans on autonomy, but emotional intelligence will still be the strength of humans. AI will be better that humans in autonomy and will execute more objectively and tirelessly, however, life around us will always need the right mix of IQ (Intelligence Quotient), EI (Emotional Intelligence) and many more things to address problems. Consciously keep sharpening your EI. Develop your taste in areas beyond work and learn music, do martial arts, go out for swimming, learn a new culinary skill, meet your family and friends, engage in your community, do something funny because there will be more to life that AI alone can handle.

To sum up, do remember that the past 200 years of industrialization and automation has only added more jobs in the global economy. I always cite the example of Andrew Carnegie one of the founding fathers of American industries. Andrew’s father was a Scottish hand loom weaver who got out of business due to advent of new technology of steam powered hand-loom. This forced the family to immigrate to the United States. Andrew acquired new age skills and assessed new opportunities and went on to become the biggest steel magnate of his time. He is today known as father of American philanthropy. Not everyone can be a Carnegie but there’s no harm in looking beyond and taking the new opportunities that come along. New technology will come with its bundle of boons and banes and it’s important to appreciate both sides of the coin as aptly summed up by Roy Amara in the famous Amara’s Law that states “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run” . So, stay informed, assess where the future is headed, do your bit of work on yourself and ride the wave of change that’s coming your way!