The Chinese boardgame Go was invented over 2500 years ago, and has been played by over a billion people. Generally considered to be considerably more complex than Chess, the number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10170, which is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. It should therefore come as no surprise that at the tournament level, successful players are typically mathematical geniuses. And among the top players, no one in recent memory has achieved a higher level of accomplishment than Lee Sedol, the Michael Jordan of Professional Go, and winner of 18 International championships.
Unlike Checkers and Chess, in which computers established supremacy over top human players during the 1990s, it was generally assumed that even the extraordinarily high computational speeds of advanced supercomputers would fail to match human prowess at Go. Until 2017, that is, when a Google DeepMind program named AlphaGo won its match with Mr. Lee 4 games to 1. The fact that AlphaGo triumphed was intellectually earth shattering, but one of its choices – Move 37 in game two – involved a strategy that no prior human player had ever selected or frankly would ever have even conceived. This event, more than any other, is likely to go down in history as the earliest landmark demonstration of AI creativity, proving its ability to surpass human intuition in complex domains, and marking the true beginning of the AI revolution.
It’s nearly impossible to accurately assess the true significance and likely impacts of AI and the approaching ‘Singularity’ in which an AI program will achieve consciousness. As with most baby boomers, I suffer from “Jetsons Disappointment Syndrome”, in which the world promised by the Jetsons cartoon that I watched as a youngster featuring humanoid robots and flying cars failed to materialize. In retrospect, the unfulfilled expectation of a vastly different technological world wasn’t caused by scientific failure. We simply haven’t experienced it yet, due to the fact that technological progress doesn’t occur in a linear manner. It occurs exponentially, so that the inclusion of Rosie the Robot in human families as well as workplaces is now right around the corner.
In the jewelry industry, let’s start with the fact that AI jewelry design capabilities will now completely change the way we source items for our customers. While we will still stock core assortments of cash and carry items, I suspect that the vast majority of what we will sell will be designed by AI jewelry design programs, taking instructions directly from the consumer in spoken English, dramatically reducing inventory keeping costs, and elevating the jewelry purchasing experience.
In this context I vividly remember walking into a CAD production room in one of the major sightholders over a decade ago and seeing dozens of CAD technicians at work. At the time I was impressed by their scale, but recognize that now it will be possible to deploy hundreds of AI programs almost instantaneously building millions of CAD designs at a cost of 3 cents each. With this kind of AI design firepower, you can imagine that the current jewelry catalog selling model will now need to significantly evolve in order to remain relevant.
Of even greater importance to your business may be changes that occur in the relative employability of human beings in countries where AI and robots proliferate. One recent estimate suggests that 47 percent of all US jobs will be eliminated in the next decade by generative AI automation. And if your 8-year-old daughter tells you that she wants to be a surgeon, I suggest you encourage her to study hard and get good grades, while keeping to yourself the recognition that in 20 years, there will be no human surgeons. And with medical knowledge now doubling at the astonishing rate of every 72 days, the human capacity to process exponential increases in information will render us completely unable to keep up.
Perhaps most troubling are the implications for what will happen when an AI program finally becomes conscious, an event that is likely less than 6 years away. I am especially concerned with something called the Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who in the ‘50s famously asked, “Where is everybody?” while discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of alien civilizations and the lack of evidence for their existence. Is it possible that every technologically advanced civilization inevitably creates a superintelligent AI consciousness that will ultimately turn against its creators, leading to their destruction?
The transformative power of AI will now change every element of our collective experience. As a business owner or employee I suggest you increase your awareness of it, and embrace the way it can fundamentally transform your role and your company for the better. As a human being about to enter an unknown world, let’s hope the benefits outweigh the risks.
Class Dismissed!
