“Will AI take our jobs?”

People tend to talk about AI as an autonomous agent. We anthropomorphize AI with human verbs such as write, see, draw, listen, converse. I don’t think these verbs are incorrect, but they leave another verb to the imagination: intend. If we believe AI has its own intent, separate from our own, we’re misstepping.

AI is very narrow, and fragile. It doesn't function well outside of the scope it's set up for. It can only manage simple objective functions; so, it really is us, the humans, using our human intelligence to apply it effectively to the point where a job may be automated.

And even so, jobs must be highly repeatable tasks for us to be able to automate them completely away. (If you want to think about the jobs of the future, think about the non-repeatable, nuanced parts of a job and see how you can scale that up.)

Valuing data means valuing privacy

Over the last five years we have come to be able to track anything, and the costs of doing so are shrinking. Just as Moore’s law predicted the doubling of computational power every 18 months (and therefore the cost-per-computation halving every 18 months), we are seeing the emergence of a new era of cost reduction: cost-per-prediction.

UPDATE June 13, 2017: Last week I posted V1 of our Map of the Canadian AI Ecosystem, and since then I’ve been inundated with additions. While it’s still incomplete, I thought it was important to update the map currently being sent around and reinforce the idea that this ecosystem is in constant flux. Already, our list has mushroomed from about 160 startups to over 550. Goes to show how much is happening just below our attention.