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There Are Things That Robots Can’t Do (And Never Will)
I recently went to an event that featured a panel of experts discussing the impact artificial intelligence will have on society. As the discussion was winding down, the moderator asked what humans could still do that today’s superpowered algorithms cannot. One of the panelists, a renowned neuroscientist, replied, “die.”
“Well that was morbid,” I thought. It’s also completely untrue. There are lots of things machines will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born. These things may seem incredibly prosaic, but they’re actually deeply consequential and far reaching.
As MIT’s Sandy Pentland has put it, “We teach people that everything that matters happens between your ears, when in fact it actually happens between people.” Collaboration, with humans and machines, is becoming a key to competitive advantage and that’s where we need to focus. As I wrote in Forbes a decade ago, the future of technology is always more human.
Borges, The Infinite Monkey Theorem And The Library of Babel
The Argentinian writer Jorge Borges had a fascination with concept known as the infinite monkey theorem. The idea is that if you had an infinite amount of monkeys…
