Recently I finished the Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera – Generative AI for Everyone. These are my notes for week 3 from that course.

Most of this week was focused on how generative AI is useful and it is not going to take away jobs from people as it is projected. if there will be jobs impacted, then AI will create more jobs.

Generative AI and Business – Most of business contains many jobs/roles. Each role carries out a set of task. The goal of the business should be to see which of the tasks could be automated using AI such that it helps the person in that role. 

For example, a gardener

1. trims the grass,
2. pulls out the weeds,
3. collects and throws garden trash 
4. plants grass
5. plants fruits
6. adds soil
7. and so on

As we can see it’s now possible to automate any of the tasks above, so the role of gardener cannot be automated using generative AI.

Next, we see that generative AI can be used to augument an existing job instead of replacing it. 

For example, let’s think of surgeon, who has to perform a complicated surgery next day. Right now, he has to go through various medical text books, research papers and so on to research the procedure and then next day perform the surgery. With the help of Generative AI tools, the same research could be done in much less time and so surgeon can perform surgery sooner.

Generative AI will most likely affect the jobs of knowledge workers.

Concerns about AI – 

1. Amplifying humanity’s worst impulses – Generative AI is trained using the data on the internet which contains bias for example. And so the AI will also have this bias in it’s answers. This bias can be reduced using the RLHF ( Reinforcement learning using human feedback)
2. Job loss – As we said earlier, AI automates/auguments various tasks of a job, it can’t automate the whole job. So job loss won’t be that significant. For example, a radiologist has many tasks like
   • operating imaging software
   • communicating results
   • interpreting x-ray
   • handling complications during procedure and so on.
     Lot of these tasks can not be automated. Only the “interpreting x-ray” could be automated. So we will always need a radiologist. However, a radiologist who uses AI to help could replace current radiologist in future. 
3. Causing Human Extinction – AI can cause human extinction looks to be far fetched.

Artificial General Intelligence

AI that can do any intellectual task that a human can.

Examples:

• Learn to drive a car through ~20 hours of practice.
• Complete a PhD thesis after ~5 years of work.
• Do all the tasks of a computer programmer (or any other knowledge worker)

Responsible AI

• Fairness: Ensuring AI does not perpetuate or amplify biases
• Transparency: Making AI systems and their decisions understandable to stakeholders impacted
• Privacy: Protecting user data and ensure confidentiality
• Security: Safeguard AI systems from malicious attacks
• Ethical Use: Ensuring AI is used for beneficial purposes

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