Andrew Ng, a highly capable and respected AI expert, recently wrote an excellent article on deeplearning.ai. Here are a couple of excerpts that really resonated with me:
On how to find AI-focused project ideas for business:
I’ve found the following recipe useful as a brainstorming aid:
- Consider the jobs of the company’s employees and contractors, and break down the jobs into tasks.
- Examine each commonly done task to see if it’s amenable to either assistance (augmentation) or automation using AI tools such as supervised learning or generative AI.
- Assess the value of doing so.
Which jobs are, and aren’t in danger of being replaced by AI:
Many jobs in which some tasks can be automated aren’t likely to go away. Instead, AI will augment human labor while humans continue to focus on the things they do better. However, jobs that are mostly or fully automatable may disappear, putting people out of work. In such cases, as a society, we have a duty to take care of the people whose livelihoods are affected... Meanwhile, lowering the cost of delivering certain services is bound to increase the demand for some jobs.. In this way, AI will create many jobs as well as destroy some.
Some programmers worry that generative AI will automate their jobs. However, programming involves enough different tasks, some of which are hard to automate, that I find it very unlikely that AI will automate these jobs anytime soon.