Work and artificial intelligence

Not too long ago (in human history anyway) the way to find out some information was to read a book or series of papers. Wires and signals gave way to tapping on a keyboard and staring at the screen whilst you wait for a website to show you a list of potential answers to your question. Finally even that approach is being displaced. Now that website shows you a summary for your query tailored by artificial intelligence. In fact, most are now using AI based chat apps in place of search engines.

The future

We outsourced the task of sifting through shelves of books and papers to algorithms and search engines. Now humans are beginning to do the same for the selection of that information, something they previously did by hand and eye themselves.

But that is not all. In tech circles we tend to be overzealous in our predictions of the future. However, the future often ends up not too far away from the wild predictions, in this instance programmers are one of the first waves to be deeply effected both positively and negatively, they are the first in a generational experiment that will continue across any knowledge based repeatable tasks.

We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think. - António R. Damásio