The Pets of the future

I’m an avid watcher of TED talks and I recently came across a really cool one talking about deep learning machine algorithms. Sounds complicated — I know — but the way Jeremy Howard showcases how it works and what it does is on the simpler side and definitely worth the watch:

The most interesting part of this video isn’t the technology he’s showcasing, but the last 2 minutes of the video as he quickly brushes over what this technology might do to society.

Everyone of us try to find importance in our life by the activities we engage ourselves in on a daily basis. For most of us that is our job, but as computers become better and better at doing things humans once could only do, those jobs will start to dry up. As Jeremy showcases the translation software or the photo captioning software I started to realize our days are limited in the jobs we can perform. Let’s be honest we can’t compete with an insanely focused machine that does not need to sleep. So on a social level what does this mean? How do we justify our ever growing population if we no longer need the labor force? What do we do with all this free time? How do our social systems work if they are based on labor? How do we find importance in our lives?

Dogs are a social animal that if in the wild live in pacts and perform a few different tasks: protect the pact, eat and provide food, and mate to reproduce and keep the pact living into the future. However, as we domesticated the dog their purpose seemed to shift and now (especially in LA) have very little purpose — they spend the majority of their time wrapped up in a sweater lounging around, but let’s be honest what else is the dog to do? The tasks it once had have all been stripped and humans provide every possible thing the dog could want.

Are we on the brink of becoming nothing more than a pet to the computer?

These conversations need to start taking effect, because I think our days our limited as A.I. becomes much more advanced and as Jeremy points out it might be a social disruption that we won’t easily be able to resolve.