Do you complement the computer?
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 at 06:16AM One of my favorite NYT columnists, David Brooks, wrote an intriguing column last month. In Thinking for the Future, he writes:
We’re living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you’re probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis*. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. As Tyler Cowen puts it in his relentlessly provocative recent book, “Average Is Over,” “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.”
And goes on to suggest these ways humans can complement AI as:
- Freestylers
- Synthesizers
- Humanizers
- Conceptual engineers
- Motivators
- Moralizers
- Greeters
- Economizers
- Weavers
I'm not sure I agree in detail with all of Brooks's categories, but I subscribe to the premise - that machines will be better at many tasks and we humans, especially educators, need to focus on what computers cannot do - create, motivate, console, dream, inspire, and love.
* If you are skeptical of this, read or re-read Kevin Kelly's Better Than Human: Why Robots Will - and Must - Take our Jobs Wired, vol. 21, no.1, December 24, 2012. He makes the case that 70% of current occupations will be replaced by devices with artificial intelligence before the end of the century.
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