| New Jobs |
September 5, 2019
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| Since he got some knowledge about a futuristic AI society from a mathematics professor who wrote a book, he started to think about new future jobs. The professor said that jobs that AI are good at would be replaced by AI and robots, while jobs that AI are not good at would remain, or be created. She explained that AI can't think for itself because it doesn't have 'notion' or 'ideas'. AI is 'thinking' by calculation ~addition and subtraction. AI can't talk with people suitably because AI doesn't know what humans are. The professor also said that AI can't create jobs, it can only improve efficiency of the jobs that already exist. In other words, AI is good at pursuing efficiency. So he started to think about jobs that don't need efficiency. What are the jobs that don't pursue efficiency? He first thought of arts. Arts don't require efficiency. Are there any paintings which require speed? Fast painting competition? He recently had a chance to look at paintings in the local art museum. There were paintings that were opposite from impressionist, called realism. They look like photos. If you look at the pictures closely, you will be surprised because you can see all the strands of a person's hair that were brushed one by one. Hundreds of strokes? No, thousands! One explanation plaque said that one large sized painting normally takes months, some of them years! "But why? Why do these painters use this method?" Different from the era of Leonardo da Vinci, we have good cameras and good photographic paper. Why do they need to use this hard, enduring method? Another plaque explained about the meaning of the realism method, but somehow he couldn't understand it. But as he looked at each painting one by one, he felt something with the paintings that he  couldn't feel with photographs. He remembered somebody's remark that modern people tend to try to understand things, but understanding means to change the idea into words. There are a lot of things you can't change into words in the world. We should feel them, not understand them. "But ... we all can't be artists. Artists are a very small number of special people who have talent and/or who are willing to choose hard training. In addition, there are other jobs that are similar to the arts: writers, musicians, pro sports players, dancers, performers, instrument players, etc... If writers pursue efficiency in their novels, would it become haiku or tanka? No! Nobody demands efficiency to a master's novels. AI computers might perform an instrument perfectly to the score, but they can't play ad lib to fit the customers or their feelings on that day. Anyways, those jobs are all for humans, but the number of jobs are too small. So, what about the rest of us? Is there something between these creative jobs and routine jobs? AI is good at routine jobs." One idea that came up to him: "How about a reader?" A job to read books aloud for the people who can't read books easily like some senior people, whose eyes are weak and feel troublesome for reading, or get tired easily. You can go to the customer's house and read books that the customer asks for. "But ..." It seems that AI robots can replace this job easily. If you put one of your books on a machine, for example the machine named 'Perfect Reader', would start to flip the pages and read it... When he checked on the internet about this idea, there was already a machine that flips pages and reads books for blind people, this robot design won an award in a useful robot competition in 2008. And he knew that in Kindle-like e-books, there is an auto voice reading function. But human beings can change his/her reading speed depending on the listeners' comprehension. However, maybe new machines would have this function as well as a function to change the voice's gender and even generation. When the person might get bored with that book, you could change the book from his/her bookshelf. This flexibility is one of humans' strong points. But if it is an AI robot, it could get any book from a broad selection on the internet. But human beings can recommend some books from your own bookshelf saying, "Today I brought this book. This has been the most influential book in my life." or "I borrowed this book from one of my relatives. She is your age and her preference is similar to yours, I think." But AI computers could have the person's personal data, her/his purchase history, preferences, etc. and could choose a book from other similar people's preferential big data. He was stuck. At this level, maybe he was a person who would be easily replaced by AI robots. |
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*subtraction :引き算
*impressionist :印象派
*strand :糸、髪
*plague :プレート
*influential :影響力のある
*preferential :好きな