Why young people must learn about AI

The following brief is actually for people of ANY age, but I'll focus on young people because THAT is their BIGGEST opportunity for creating a new career or business that will suit them AND make a lot of money.

AI or artificial intelligence is perhaps the most powerful technology ever invented by mankind, and it is going to disrupt every facet of the economy and of society.

Its impact cannot be overstated so it's important to understand what it is, how it works and how to position oneself in the AIconomy (AI-driven economy).

The most prominent form of AI today is of the Deep Learning variety where it mimicks the neural networks in our brain.

As per Wikipedia:

Deep learning is a class of machine learning algorithms that uses multiple layers to progressively extract higher-level features from the raw input. For example, in image processing, lower layers may identify edges, while higher layers may identify the concepts relevant to a human such as digits or letters or faces.

An older form of AI is expert systems which are programmed by humans using "if then" rules, as well as a user interface, inference engines and a knowledge database.

The best book to understand the five radically different types of AIs is The Master Algorithm, by AI professor Pedro Domingos.

Practically speaking, though, people must understand that AI can do what humans can do, but FASTER, BETTER and CHEAPER.

*** Any work or task that can be explained clearly and taught to another person, CAN be automated and performed by a computer or AI.

However, AI can also be "creative", as was demonstrated by GPT-3.

Copy.ai is an example of a website that can generate very creative copy by absorbing a lot of copy from the Web and rearranging it in order to generate new and original copy, ads, stories and content.

It is faster and far cheaper than any human copywriter, and the jury is out as to whether it is better (although it is certainly going to get better).

It is also massively scalable in a way that no human copywriter or even groups of human copywriters can ever be.

There is no point in resisting new technologies; it is far wiser to learn, asap, how to use and leverage them in one's work.

Digital marketing, in particular, will be massively disrupted by these new AI-based technologies.

The curriculum of digital marketing training programs must evolve and adapt QUICKLY to these new technological realities, otherwise students will graduate and be hopelessly unprepared for the job market.

For instance, computational thinking must be taught to students so they can create solutions that CAN be executed by computers.

A greater understanding of computer programming must also be fostered so that students can appreciate the speed, accuracy and processing power of computers.

Indeed, students must learn to program their computers even if their programming skills are rudimentary.

I use Autohotkey but they can learn Python, which is relatively easy to learn.

By learning how to program their own computers, they'll be in a much better position to leverage platforms like Copy.ai.

One thing's for sure: the age of AI work is now upon us and the winners will be those who learn asap how to guide and supervise the work done by AI.

The losers will be those who cling on to the obsolete notion that work must be done primarily by humans.

It is the destiny of mankind to free itself from routine, repetitive and/or computational work that can be done faster, better and more accurately by computers.

ABOUT PETER NGUYEN

Peter is an AI researcher, digital marketing teacher (www.tav.ca) and software entrepreneur based in Montreal, Canada. Join his entrepreneurship group in order to get free courses on business, marketing, sales and computer programming: www.tinyurl.com/entrepreneuracademygroup.