Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Предсказания Жириновского за 30 лет

[13.06.2017] Forbes: Confronting The Jobless Economy (English)

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What will we humans do as artificial intelligence and automation replace us in an ever-wider range of roles? In a world of rapid change, educators, policy makers and parents ask how education must change. What skills will be required for our future? Science and math? Creativity? Emotional intelligence? Empathy?..

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...As a professor at Northwestern University, students, alumni and others often seek advice as to what could be next for their professional lives. “On what should I focus my limited time on earth?” Standard guru advice is to ‘find your passion’. True, but typically unhelpful. Passion is an overused word— how many people are “passionate” about selling more widgets? — and few of us seem to have clarity regarding what motivates us to outperform. This can take years to discover and our perspectives change over time.

As technology change destroys traditional roles for human beings — and generates new ones — the question of “what’s next” becomes central for each of us...

...Few roles are beyond risk. Techno-optimists argue that people will simply find new roles. As agricultural technology improved and agricultural employment declined from 60% of the US workforce in 1850 to under 2% by 2000, people found their way to industry. Similarly, people navigated from an industrial to a knowledge economy. The path was not without conflict, but we adapted.

Historical analogies can be misleading. The Industrial Revolution required more hands to operate machinery. The Knowledge Economy required more minds to do cognitive work. With AI and automation, we’ll require fewer of each. What work will be beyond hands and minds?

And this process will happen much faster. Past transitions occurred over generations. According to economic historian Paul David, electrification of manufacturing from the late 19th Century onward took about 40 years from the first central power station to the recognition of significant productivity gains to the economy. Massive Chinese manufacturer Foxconn last year announced it profitably replaced 50,000 jobs with robots. Insurance actuaries — a solidly white collar career — are already at risk. Expect our transition to be more rapid and possibly contentious...

...With support from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Summit Public Schools in Silicon Valley has built a technology platform to support personalized learning. In addition to ensuring students address basic concepts, the platform enables students to explore not just how to do things, but what things to do. What inspires them? What challenges will they design, explore and possibly conquer? Summit history teacher Aukeem Ballard explains, “It’s about what the teacher can support the students in aspiring to do through the classroom. How do we give them what they need, step out of their way, and let them do the brilliant work that we know exists in their brain?”


...To what do we aspire? This should be a life-long question. In a world where humans are obviated from more and more roles, everyone will require the ability to discover and define their missions, from near-term objectives to life-long purpose. We must prepare our children — and ourselves — with this capability. We’ll all need it.

Alfred North Whitehead observed, “Society progresses by increasing the number of things we can do without thinking.” Technology enables humanity to accomplish ever more. With such potential, our personal responsibility will become less about how to do things, and much more about what best to do.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwolcott/2017/06/13/how-education-must-change-seeking-mission-and-purpose-in-the-jobless-economy/

Learning to code will eventually be as useful as learning Ancient Greek (English)

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...Evidence suggests that coding will increasingly be implemented, even planned, by AI systems. This is part of a natural progression from computer-friendly to human-friendly systems. Consider how the end user’s experience has evolved. The graphical user interface, developed at XEROX PARC in the 1970s and brought to market with the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, overtook clunky, technical text-based interfaces with a much more intuitive approach. While operating a computer once required specific technical knowledge, today it requires almost none...

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...it’s certainly far better to know a computer language than not, remaining relevant will be a moving target as computer languages and programming environments arise, evolve, and in some cases die. A singular focus on “learning to code” can impede attention to the much more important skill of understanding how technology works, and the opportunities and risks within systems and society...

...Programming languages and environments have reflected the same trend. Since their genesis mid-last century, programming platforms have become more abstracted from the underlying 1s and 0s. For instance, programming in Ruby, developed in the 1990s, is a far cry from composing in COBOL, which rose to prominence in the 1960s. The author of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto, commented about his objective, “I really wanted a genuine ... easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn’t find one. So I decided to make it.”

Though COBOL was partly an attempt to make programming more “English-like,” Ruby and other languages developed since have brought coding languages closer to natural human communication. Extrapolate this trend and you can imagine instructing a computational system in your native tongue (really a broader, messy form of human “code”).

Already we have seen companies make computational capabilities more accessible to non-specialists. Recent MIT spinoff pienso, for instance, seeks to make “AI for All.” To empower people with no data science background to create and train their own machine learning models. In this vision, domain expertise becomes more important than programming savvy.

The need for humans to code will gradually disappear for all but the most specialized situations. Platforms will enable humans to describe in natural spoken or written language what they’d like computers to accomplish. The coding will occur behind the computational scenes. We won’t code so much as direct and request. Ultimately, coding isn’t the point. The objective is to define and communicate what we want computational systems to do.

Discovering And Defining Problems To Solve

Beyond coding, humans will identify, define and prioritize problems for computers to solve. Over the coming decades, though, computational systems will become capable of defining problems of value and generating solutions with only limited human engagement.

While we’ll shift toward human-friendly approaches, understanding how computational systems work and what possibilities and risks they pose will remain essential. But so will having broad and deep exposure across disciplines and ways of thinking.

When technology can increasingly do anything, the question becomes, what should we do and why? We humans cannot be sufficiently equipped for the future without exposure to the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Well-functioning civil society depends on it. On the eve of World War II, Winston Churchill cautioned, “Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.”

While essential, STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] as work skills (as opposed to research disciplines) harbor a Trojan Horse. The STEM capabilities required to create technology will one day generate technologies that accomplish STEM far better than human beings. If we’re too focused on STEM skills, we’ll eventually STEM ourselves out of work.

While I admit my intellectual inferiority to anyone who can read Plato in his native language, this doesn’t matter much beyond my pride. My daughters will surely learn to code. More importantly, we’ll ensure they understand how computational systems operate and the concomitant opportunities and risks.

And they’ll learn Geometry so they can visit the great people at SFI [On the threshold of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), the world’s epicenter for complexity science, a plaque in Greek characters shares Plato’s admonishment: “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.”]
https://work.qz.com/1135017/learning-to-code-will-eventually-be-as-useful-as-learning-ancient-greek/