Jobs For The Machines

 Race Against The Machine  

Artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur Jeremy Howard spoke recently on the impact of machine learning on productivity, and what the potential consequences may be for employment.

J eremy Howard, recently spoke at the Davos World Economic Forum, on the impact of machine learning on productivity, and what the potential consequences may be for employment (video below).

Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture, recounts Howard, decades after machines took those jobs, he claims that eighty percent of the workers were much worse off, in fact they did not have a basic living wage.

With machine learning, Howard claims this is about to happen again.  Such a view is also supported by Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their books, Race Against the Machineand The Second Machine Age.

According to Howard, the economic data is already pointing out the fact that technological obsolescence is already upon us.  Productivity is at record levels, whereas employment is stagnant or even going down.

Howard concludes, "Be aware of the exciting opportunities of machine learning,  but also be aware of the threats to our socio-economic systems."

A serial entrepreneur, business strategist, software developer, and committed educator, Jeremy is developing a new startup, Strategic Data Science, which aims to make machine learning accessible to non-experts. He is also currently a faculty member at Singularity University, where he teaches data science to government leaders, business executives, research scientists, and graduate students in order to "educate, inspire, and empower" them to apply exponential technologies to address some of humanity's most pressing challenges.

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He was president and chief scientist at Kaggle, a consulting platform that hosts competitions in which scientists from many disciplines use predictive modeling to solve problems that require analyzing large amounts of data.

Howard studied philosophy and worked as a management consultant before developing a passion for applying algorithms to data. Today he competes regularly in data mining competitions, which he uses to test himself and stay on the leading edge of machine learning and predictive modeling technology.

Note - The audio quality of the video is not the best, don't forget to turn down the volume after viewing. 




SOURCE  Jeremy Howard, Top Image - Roberto Parada/Mother Jones

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