The Smart Machine Age: A New Game Requires New Rules

We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines or we can be arrogant and die.

— Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener, an MIT mathematics professor and computer science pioneer, wrote those words in 1948 in a recently discovered unpublished essay for the New York Times. He literally meant them as an apocryphal warning about the dangers to humanity of uncontrolled advances in automation and artificial intelligence. For decades, such dire predictions remained on the fringe of societal concerns and relevant only to science fiction fans. The technologies that were only a gleam in Wiener's eye, however, have finally come to fruition.

Smart machines are becoming autonomous and able to tackle nonroutine cognitive tasks previously thought the exclusive purview of people. Machines are gaining natural language capabilities, voice and facial recognition, and the ability to draft sports columns and analyze due diligence documents better and faster than many human reporters or lawyers. Thanks to advances in automated perception, sensors, and robotics, machines are now able to handle what had previously prevented them from tackling nonroutine manual jobs as well, such as driving cars, picking out products from warehouse shelves, and sorting mail. High-functioning humanoid robots can now be seen on hospital floors and in hotels, restaurants, museums, and shopping malls. They aren't just flipping burgers behind the scenes: they're interacting with patrons and patients — like "Connie," the robot concierge Hilton began rolling out in 2016 in lobbies across the country in partnership with IBM Watson.

With respect to nonroutine cognitive jobs, using automated tools and algorithms, machines can now handle data analytics, pattern recognition, and deductive reasoning. Machines are becoming better than a roomful of Wharton graduates at devising portfolio investment theory for hedge funds and better than a team of Sloan-Kettering doctors at diagnosing illnesses. With investments from companies like Google, implantable biometric sensors will soon allow us to monitor our own health. Facial expression analysis software will detect the emotions and engagement of others better than our own minds. A group of researchers from MIT and the Masdar Institute, who conducted the first quantitative study of skill content changes in occupations between 2006 and 2014, concluded, "For any given skill one can think of, some computer scientist somewhere may already be trying to develop an algorithm to do it."

Combining the development of artificial neural codes and networks that model the human brain with access to Big Data, programmers can give machines the ability to process information and learn on a level that rivals and may soon exceed that of the human race.

Machines quite literally are now beating us at our own games. In March 2016 in what many artificial intelligence (AI) experts touted as the match of the century, AlphaGo — a computer program developed by Google's DeepMind AI company — defeated South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol four matches to one in the ancient Chinese strategy game. Almost twenty years after IBM's supercomputer DeepBlue bested the chess champion Gary Kasparov, AlphaGo's victory still surprised many experts who predicted that it would take at least another decade to develop a computer program with the ability to outwit and out-strategize a Go master in arguably the most complicated human board game ever invented. The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, said that algorithms used for AlphaGo "one day can be used in all sorts of problems, from health care to science."

Plenty of today's technology experts, from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to current MIT and University of Oxford academics, have sounded alarms about the potentially devastating impacts to our economy and society because of such recent and imminent technology advances. We repeat Wiener's warning here, however, not because we believe that the robot apocalypse is around the corner but because we believe that it's crucial to our relevancy as human workers and the vitality of the organizations for which we work that we pause and acknowledge the drastic changes coming and prepare ourselves to not only survive but to thrive.

We believe that there's a path to successfully navigating these strange new highly automated waters, but many of us will have to fundamentally change our views of what it means for humans to be "smart" and what it takes for humans to succeed and reach their fullest potential. To do otherwise — to ignore the impact and fail to prepare for what's to come — would indeed be a foolhardy exercise in human arrogance.

Smart Machines and a New Era

There's a growing consensus among most computer science experts, economists, and business leaders that smart machines — whether humanoid robots or invisible networked connections — that can learn, think, and perform both manual and cognitive tasks in most cases better than their human counterparts could be the biggest game changer both personally and organizationally since the Industrial Revolution. It's likely that the business, education, and leadership models created for the Industrial Revolution could become obsolete. Technological and scientific advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, virtual reality, robotics, nanotechnology, deep learning, mapping the human brain, and biomedical, genetic, and cyborg engineering could fundamentally change how all of us — from laborers to knowledge workers — live and find livelihood.

Technology that can learn and even program itself will become ubiquitous in homes, factories, and offices and soon displace even the highly educated people who have thought that their professions are immune to the risks of automation, including accountants, business managers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, researchers, architects, higher-education teachers, and consultants. Artificial intelligence — deep learning or machine learning — will be especially transformative in this regard. Speaking at a technology industry conference in May 2016, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, stated, "It's probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it's going to have on society over the next 20 years."

Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, a...