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Can Humans Compete With AI?
If the past two decades are any indication of where humanity is going, AI has already won
Remember pong? The first time I played the ground-breaking game was on a small, black-and-white TV hooked up to a Texas Instruments Commodore 64 (C64).
Pong didn’t make tennis players obsolete. The monotony of the bouncing blip — back and forth, back and forth — may have dissuaded a few on-the-fence tennis enthusiasts but humankind suffered no hidden side effect except that now a lot of people live their lives “in the game.”
The C64 was one of the first home computers. It was sort of like the roller coaster just pulling out of the station, inching slowly upward. The Macintosh, which came out about the same time but was mostly used in schools, was more like the moment when the lead car of the rollercoaster stops at the top. Peering out over the maze of twists and turns, you think “Oh shit, what have I done,” and then gravity takes over and it’s too late.
Computers didn’t make humans redundant although, they have made many jobs obsolete. Nonetheless, computers have also managed to take the mind-numbing monotony out of some jobs by doing it for us and pushing humans into other professions — I was going to write “enlightened professions” but I don’t really think that is the…
