Autonomous cars, which may be the safest we have built, keep getting easily avoidable parking tickets. While Waymos crash far less often than human drivers over tens of millions of miles, they’re still terrible at performing basic tasks – keeping out of disabled parking spots and tow-away zones, or steering clear of a church garage during Sunday service, according to the Wall Street Journal. That is the state of AI today: impressively capable at something complex, yet embarrassingly clumsy at something easy.
And it has implications for what work will remain human and what will be automated by AI. People expect AI to lead to fewer jobs in 34 of the 37 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center. In wealthy countries like the US, Australia and South Korea, about seven in 10 expect job losses over the next 20 years.
And across countries, concern among young people is rising. While fears focus on job numbers, the bigger change will be what jobs become. The nature of human work will move towards judgment.
Experts refer to AI as “jagged”, superhuman at certain tasks but weak at others, with no clear boundary between the two. AI rapidly improves where work can be automatically checked and examples are endless. But it’s shaky where no automated test can determine whether the answer is right.
Even if AI is correct a majority of the time on a task, it often doesn’t tell you when it’s inaccurate. If you’ve used AI, you’ve probably experienced how it can be confidently wrong. Some of these errors will solve themselves as models get better.
But jaggedness is a symptom of how these models learn. I see this often as a technology leader building with these systems. A smarter model still needs a right answer to learn from.
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