SAMARAHAN: Education should not be directed at narrow skill sets that can easily be taken over by machines.
Instead, said Professor Narayanan N Kulathu Ramaiyer, education should focus on unlocking the full human capacity to solve problems innovatively.
The concerns about computers taking away jobs and reducing the need for many tasks carried out in daily life are real. It is expected that 40 per cent of current human tasks will eventually be taken over by robots.
“Humans should not have to compete with these AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems,” he said when presenting his inaugural talk at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) yesterday.
His talk was entitled ‘Human versus Machine Intelligence: Staying Relevant in the Upcoming Artificial Intelligence Era’.
Narayanan’s talk addressed the misconceptions about the current state of AI while highlighting the true capacities and potential of AI systems.
The talk started with the following questions: Will we start losing jobs to robots? Will our lives be controlled by emerging data mining super-powers who will be able to dictate everything?
According to Narayanan, existing AI applications were being powered by ‘weak models of intelligent systems’.
He explained that they were called weak (or narrow) models as they were trained specifically to solve a single problem.
Examples of such AI systems include navigational systems for autonomous vehicles and diagnostic systems for treating a particular disease.
“This narrow form of intelligence is in no way comparable to the immense capacities of human intelligence,” said Narayanan.
He introduced the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (Triz) as an innovative systems methodology to identify radical solutions to these emergent problems.
He said that values-based systems were needed to neutralise the extensive scale of dehumanisation that was taking place, adding that values-based socio-technical systems would be a solution to the questions posed earlier.
