Why Artificial Intelligence is just a part of our evolution?

At the start of the 19th century most of our work was manual. Going to farm, sowing the seeds, passing water, harvesting paddy, milking the cow. Once mass manufacturing came into picture, machine took our traditional jobs. We moved into cities and started working for some one else. Then we got machines that did factory work. And machines that helped individuals. Machines to wash our clothes, dry our hair, clean our utensils — things we spent hours on. We then spent those hours to work on something else.

Today our work is more and more mental. Creating. Designing. Consuming. Everything is intangible. We are not doing much of physical labor anymore. That has already been taken up by machines. Ironically, what we lost by our vocation, we made up with our creation. We created new machines to keep us fit.

Today our main work is to create processes and products that would repeat a specific task million times. A design that would feed itself into machines and come out as a car. A process to take in invoices and generate payments. An app that would book the tickets for us. A mobile phone that we can use to communicate, share and entertain ourselves. Our work today is about creating scalable systems — systems that would do a task millions times, systems that would help solve a problem for millions and billions of people. Products that help us automate tasks and processes continuously.

Anything that could be automated is automated. Bunch of algorithms would take our routine processes and mimic them. We are adding intelligence to the algorithms so that they would be able to tackle the complex work, only humans could do before. Work handled by human intelligence is not definite. It has multiple variables. We need these intelligent machines that could take care of such mental tasks. Mental tasks that we are all doing a million times today. Time to automate these has arrived.

We call these algorithms as Artificial intelligence or AI. AI are the machines of 19th century. AI are to our mental lives, what machines were to mass manufacturing. AI will be the core that will be driving our lives in the future. AI will be the new tools that would grow in number and surround us from all directions.

This is the evolution of technology. This is the path we have already taken, long before industrialization happened. As humans we keep finding ways to not do repetitive work. We are good at that. We don’t want to keep doing what we do on the daily basis for ever. We keep finding ways to automate monotonous process, to indulge in more creative work. To work on things for the future than for the present. Which means that we also have to keep finding new things to keep ourselves occupied. New ways to make revenue, new ways to being resourceful.

Automation and Creation go hand in hand. We automate so that we have more time and money. We use these resources gained to get into newer domains of knowledge, to find new ways to unleash value, to find newer purposes for human life. Evolution of jobs, job roles, work definitions is as basic as evolution of humans ourselves. Our evolution is not just about our our physical body or brain. It is also about our work and how it has shaped the society we are in.

What we do as humans today has the biggest impact on how the future will be. Where are the most jobs of today are focused on? Is it on food production or logistics or is it on entertainment? What the top professions were 50 years back? How many of them are still in vogue today?

We keep finding new professions to architect our future. This evolution shows our maturity as a mankind. What are humans for? What can humans do and not do? What our lives should be about? Our redefinition of work every 50 years is raising all these questions and more.

Yes, Artificial Intelligence would make some of the jobs disappear. But it will also create new avenues for the next generation to focus on. Next generation need not do the same work that has been done by us and our predecessors. Artificial intelligence is the machines of the 19th century. Our lives will be full of it in the 22nd century, something that was totally unimaginable 100 years back. And we will not stop with that. We will keep finding new ways to automate our lives. Our life needs us to keep re imagining the way we live, work, eat, communicate. That’s what drives us. That’s what evolves us. Else we will be just a bunch of cows grazing for millions of years without noticing it.