Artificial intelligence: past and future

coming years, “You’re highly educated. You make a lot of money. You should still be afraid.” In fact, worries about the impact of technology on the job market are not only about the far, but also the not too far future. In a recent book, Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors argue that “technological progress is accelerating innovation even as it leaves many types of workers behind.” Indeed, over the past 30 years, as we saw the personal computer morph into tablets, smartphones, and cloud computing, we also saw income inequality grow worldwide. While the loss of millions of jobs over the past few years has been attributed to the Great Recession, whose end is not yet in sight, it now seems that technology-driven productivity growth is at least a major factor. The fundamental question, I believe, is whether Herbert Simon was right, even if his timing was off, when he said “Machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do.” While AI has been proven to be much more difficult than early pioneers believed, its inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Simon may have been right. Bill Joy’s question, therefore, deserves not to be ignored. Does the future need us?