Ioan Iacob opens future makers 2018 with forthright speech on AI
Ioan Iacob opens future makers 2018 with forthright speech on AI

Ioan Iacob opens future makers 2018 with forthright speech on AI

On October 14, Future Makers held the 3rd edition of their Innovations for Tomorrow Conference, that QUALITANCE CEO and Co-founder Ioan Iacob was invited to open with a speech on “AI and the Future of Work.”

Future Makers” is an entrepreneurship educational program, where young people aged between 20 and 29 can advance progressive business ideas, get the support they need during a 3-month “incubation” stage and stand a chance to win 20,000 in prizes. Through this inspiring program, Global Shapers Bucharest Hub and Social Innovation Solutions are creating a conducive environment, encouraging and nourishing entrepreneurial initiatives that will prepare Romania for what lies ahead in the next 10, 20 and 30 years.  

Ioan’s candid keynote encouraged the audience to view Artificial Intelligence from an objective perspective that you can grasp in the following highlights:

AI does not live in Hollywood. It lives in our everyday life, and we need to accept it.

We need to stop thinking of AI as some Hollywood character, because AI is already part of our lives and it’s nothing like Star Trek or marketing product Sophia. We might have to wait a bit longer before we live next door to robots similar to the AI characters that Hollywood has been feeding us  for the past decades.

In spite of interacting with AI on a daily basis, people are still unrealistic about this amazingly efficient technology. Only 34% of people are aware of their AI interactions, yet statistics show that about 84% of people interact with various forms of AI every day.

We’re surrounded by so many applications that are using AI, but it’s only when get to see Sophia interacting on stage, somewhat like a circus bear, that we stand in awe and start panicking about robots taking over. We get hysterical about 1 fatality caused by driverless cars – that’s 1 casualty in 1,300, 000 autonomous vehicle miles driven in the US from 2014-2017, but we’re not that bothered with human drivers killing 16 people every day*.

On a large scale, when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, we’re dealing with a state of denial that doesn’t do us any good. We get too passionate, when in fact we should keep it real and see the advantages in AI taking space and getting better at so many things.

* In 2016, there were 5,997 pedestrian fatalities in the US, i.e. 16 people were killed by human drivers every day.

AI is a solution to many of our problems, why not let it do the dumb work for us?

Doctors spend about 80% of their time analyzing data and giving diagnoses. That’s a lot when you think of the time they should dedicate to actual patient care. So why not collaborate with AI, when it’s already doing a better job at this?

Look no further than the BioMind AI system, developed in China, which made made correct diagnoses in 87% of 225 cases in about 15 minutes. At the same time, a team of 15 senior doctors only achieved 66% accuracy.

AI is pushing us to upgrade our skills, and that’s a good thing. 

The future of work is way beyond single skill, repetitive and mindless jobs. By hiring AI to do dumb, repetitive tasks, we’ll have more time to explore our creativity and focus on meaningful things. Because it will be long before AI gets creative, takes initiative, shows empathy or solves really complex human interactions. That’s still our job, and it will be so for quite a few years.  

In the future, we’ll be hiring AI and tell it what do, whereas people’s job will be to create something from 0 to 1. In many ways, it will be yet another Industrial Revolution, and if you’re looking back to the previous ones, the most important consequence you’ll see is progress.

For more insights, watch Ioan’s keynote: