Recently jobless, I took to trolling the internet for good inspiring stories and I fortunate to bump into a long form on George Hotz inventing a self-driving car. George is of internet fame when he was the first to successfully hack an iPhone and then made a mess of Sony. That’s then.
There are many ways to skin a cat, at least if you can kill the cat first. But then automating self-propulsion isn’t a piece of cake. Planes have been flying themselves for over 84 years but all because danfo drivers don’t fly. Come to terra firma, somewhere around Abule Egba, and it’s a different ball game.
The best known name in the game is Google and they have been plugging away at this for years. Meanwhile African bad boy, Elon Musk recently released a patch that allows a Tesla to drive itself on the highway.
Summary, it costs zillions of dollars and millions of years to do build a working self-respecting self-driving car. Really?
George has turned all this on its head. In October of this year, he invested $50,000 ($30K of this was for a brand new Acura ILX 2016) and presto out came out a decent self-driving automobile. In 2 months? You must be kidding me.
This is where it starts to get interesting.
George’s approach is totally different from others. Instead of programming every conceivable rule and regulation of how to drive and what to expect (let Google come to Obalende!) he taught the car driving like the way I could teach my niece. Many things have made this possible – advent of deep learning, cheap computers, sensors, etc.
The bit I love is his bet against Musk.
So what has AI got to do with losing your job? Well, truth is AI can be taught to do many things. They already power simple things around you – SIRI, Cortana, Google search, image recognition, etc. What happens when it can be a perfect secretary, equity trader, physician, customer service officer, proofreader – correcting my numerous typos?
There is a lot it can do or may not do. The scariest for me though, would be when AIs can invent other AIs. Then, I’m sure that damnation would be an understatement.