Everybody has been a little anxious about the subject since Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein in 1818. But the idea takes on a far deeper meaning when a renowned scientist like Stephen Hawking says in an interview on the BBC: "The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of human race … humans who are limited by slow biological evolution could not compete, and would be superseded."
The subject rose to prominence with a seminal paper by Alan Turing in 1950, which opened with the following sentence: "I propose to consider the question: can machines think?"
During the summer of 1956, a group of scientists — including Herbert Simon and John Nash, two future Nobel laureates — met at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They devised the term artificial intelligence, and tried to build a machine that could mimic how the human brain functions. They failed.
To be fair, given the technological and computing advancements at the time, a top-down approach to reproduce human intelligence was far too complex.
Since 1995, however, big data made it possible to create algorithms that can exploit the formidable wealth of information which has become available.
In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov and, this year, Google’s AlphaGo defeated grand master Lee Sedol at Go.
In both cases, the machines played better than the scientist who programmed them. They could rapidly process a huge quantity of possible moves and adapt them to various scenarios. Moreover, the more they played, the more they improved their performance and learned from past moves.
Artificial intelligence, thus, consists of machines that can reprogram themselves by accessing and processing a considerable amount of information. In other words, they are data-driven learning machines. The economic sectors that would be directly affected by such a revolution are all those where machines could manage a huge quantity of information better than people. They include self-driven transport, finance, health, personal assistants, translation services, voice and face recognition, and of course automation and robotics.
Artificial intelligence will displace jobs. It has occurred during every industrial revolution. However, today, it will affect developed and emerging economies equally. At the beginning of globalisation, factories were sent offshore to countries where labour cost was particularly low, such as China. Then, companies moved to countries with cheap brain power, for example India, which has a large pool of software development engineers.
Recently, many factories are returning onshore to the US and Europe, thanks to improvements in advanced automation achieved by robotics and self-programming machines. Blue-collar jobs destroyed when factories left their home countries are not replaced on the way back. Instead, highly qualified jobs are created mainly in computing and robotics. And there are not as many.
As an additional consequence, many emerging economies are now worried about experiencing a phase of early de-industrialisation as factories go home.
Will intelligent machines one day be able to write a sonnet like Shakespeare or question the meaning of consciousness like Descartes, Kant or Sartre? Maybe not. But in the meantime, it appears increasingly certain, and for some disturbing, that our relationship to work will never be the same again.
• Garelli is founder of the IMD World Competitiveness Centre
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