This week Alpha Go victory shows the great strides artificial intelligence is making. It was predicted that it would take at least another decade before this milestone was reached. While there is great promise with all of the new possibilities AI can create, it can also be a bit scary as we see the potential for many jobs to be automated away. As an example: self driving cars could be on the roads by 2020. Think of all of the jobs that revolve around transporting things: Taxi’s, UPS, Truck Drivers, etc. Even the car industry could be in for a shakeup as cars might become a shared commodity. This is just one category where machine intelligence could take millions of jobs out of the marketplace. Unfortunately most of the recent growth sectors for jobs have been primarily in the service industry and these jobs might be some of the first to be automated away.
Thinking about all of the jobs that will go away over the coming years it can be hard to know what areas are relatively safe from automation. What avenues will be available for our kids in the future? When major changes occur, there are huge opportunities for entrepreneurs. To look for opportunities one needs to look for the industries that are currently taking advantage of exponential trends. Right now opportunities are coming for Robotics, 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Genetics, and Nanotech. The convergence of these technologies will create exciting new opportunities for entrepreneurs. The question is how can we get our children interested in these technologies now. Schools do little to encourage interest and quite frankly by the time they setup a curriculum for one of these technologies it will be out of date given how fast things are changing. So in a future post we will look at how to spark your child’s interest in one or more of these technology fields.
Watch this video if you have a further interest in Artificial Intelligence by the CEO of DeepMind.
