Will we be replaced by machine?
It is the questions I want to talk about in this speech.
According to recent study from a Japanese company, machine will take over at least 50% of total jobs. Will my job be replaced by machine? Before we panic, let us firstly understand what machine can do? I will give you three examples.
Example one, machine can play chess against people, like Alpha go can beat Ke Jie. Well, the latest news is Ke Jie was also beaten by a program “Yue Yi“ created by Chinese company Tencent. In the future chess Olympic, we are likely to see all players are machines from Tencent, Google, Baidu but without any human. How funny is it!
Example wo, machine translation is another big topic. At least for European language translation (i.e. English to French or French to German), we have made huge progress that an real case in Citrix is that the linguists who are expertise in European languages only do spot testing after strings translated by Microsoft AI engine. I am afraid the job of translator may get disappeared in five or ten years.
Examplethree, self-driving car empowered by computer visual are extremely hot topics.Not only Tesla, many local Chinese companies are also researching self-drivingsolutions. Have you read a local news before recent Chinese new year? Aself-driving bus has been deployed in the campus of Southeast University. Inthe future, the good news is we do not have to drive ourselves, the bad news isif you want to make a living by driving like a Didi driver. You won’t make it.
For other cases, doctors, bank staffs or even lawyers as long as the information can be intelligently analyzed by machine. They are all in risk to be replace by machines.“Oh my god, My job is in danger!” Before making statement, let us hear a real story from mine.
I studied machine learning algorithm since May last year. During the one year study, I only did one thing which was to use Machine learning to predict stock price – Shanghai stock market price. After watching two videos from, I decided to write my own programs. I will not talk about technical details since it is not interesting at all.
Have I earned a lot?Unfortunately, the result looked really terrible. The prediction worked when the overall index grown but failed most of time when the index declined. From my program, the most recommended stock dropped 20% in recent three months.
I shared this tragic story with a friend who was in the stock industry. “Man, I lost so much, please do help me”. “Are you insane? Your action looks really stupid”. He told me from his knowledge, machine learning can be used as assistant but not decision maker.“Never fully trust the recommendation from machine”.
Well, although the story is sad, a good news is you still can see me on the stage to complete my toastmaster speech.
OK, finally, let us go back to the original question “will we be replaced by machine”?
Based on my understanding, for things human can do for sure then machine will probably can do the same. Like playing chess, driver a car, it is only a matter of time when human will be completed replaced by machine.
In the contrary, for things human can do but with uncertain results, like stock, gamble or other creative tasks, it is still difficult to replace human by machine. My fellow toastmaster members. Do you agree with me?
