We must learn to be more human in the age of artificial intelligence
It was an interview of Nvidia founder Jensen Huang (bit.ly/3PcQSHB) that brought home to me the most profound effect that artificial intelligence (AI) will have: It will teach us how to be human in the age of AI. Omar Al-Olama, AI minister of the UAE, asked Huang what people should learn themselves and educate their kids in this age of AI. Huang gave a counterintuitive answer.
He said that most people think we should all learn computer science and AI programming, but we should be doing exactly the opposite. With AI, he said, it is the job of tech companies to create computing technology such that no one has to programme. Everyone in the world will become a programmer.
I agree with Huang that the greatest revolution brought about by AI and Generative AI is that the long-standing human-machine gap will close. The languages that we will use to work with computers will be human languages like English, Bengali or Spanish, and not esoteric ones like C++, Python or PHP, languages that belong to machines. Bill Gates and Satya Nadella of Microsoft have echoed this.
Gates is excited that “AI is the new UI"—the user interface for machines, which moved from graphical to browsers and then apps, and will now move to human languages. Nadella has backed this up, “So far we had to learn the language of the computer, now the computer has to learn our language." So far, the ability to make machines perform magic was restricted to a tiny fraction of our population: software engineers and programmers. The elite among them—mostly young, Caucasian and male, largely living on the US west coast—built the world around us, harnessing powerful computing machines to create new products and services that the rest of us use.
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