The future belongs to hairdressers and plumbers

Say goodbye to the office. Not because of Covid-19 but because of AI.

Cut Hair

99% of what you learned at school is redundant.

** AI will create digital assets quicker, cheaper, and better, than you can. **

Jack Ma says learn music or art. I disagree. If you want to avoid becoming redundant then learn to cut hair.

Music will be claimed by robots. Art will be claimed by robots. Cutting hair will not.

Goodbye Office

We simply will not need offices full of people doing labour intensive cognitive tasks.

Jobs conducted by our armies of office workers will disappear like crop worker jobs during the industrial revolution.

How did we get here?

I remember AI trying to win chess. First it beat you and I, then it beat the world's best.

Was it intelligent? Nope. Purists (mainly into artifical neural networks) dismissed such parlour tricks as "Old AI" a term meant to be as derogatory as it sounds.

Old AI was simply a novel way to embed human intelligence in code.

Deep Learning

Research into artifical neural networks plodded along - in a distinctly underwhelming way - until researchers added layers and learning became deep.

Then things jumped a whole lot. Deep AI was able to learn quicker and better than ever before. It was generative. It was predictive.

Deep AI was so good at pattern matching it convinced the world's best Go player to retire at the age of 36.

General AI

General AI is the point at which human intelligence becomes redundant.

We are not there. But when AI performs parlour tricks in a specific niche that is indiscernible from GAI then the point is academic. For that niche, human intelligence is redundant.

Life Changing

The latest incarnation GPT-3 can generate human level output from a seeded input.

Give it a partial image and it guesses the rest. Give it a paragraph and it writes an article. Give it a riff and it plays a tune.

This changes the landscape drastically.

Learn Plumbing

If you don't want to cut hair then learn plumbing.

Imagine trying to install a new heating system in an old house. AI will not get it's hands dirty there.

Maybe we should.