What's left for humans?
I recently got a Tesla, and using full self-driving has been a wake up call to just how many advantages AI has over humans. The few times I disengaged it because I thought it was going into the wrong lane, it turned out that the car was right and I was wrong. I realized that there is no hope of me driving better than a neural net that knows every road, sees in every direction at once, and never gets tired or distracted.
Given that AI has certain inherent advantages over human intelligence, what kind of moats will remain for us as humans? It's a big question.
One short-term answer is that the world we live in was created for humans, and in some domains, AI has not closed the gap yet. For instance, AI still struggles to use internet user interfaces. While any computer-literate human can navigate a web page with ease, AI is still not great at making accurate clicks and drags because image embeddings are not optimized for such precision. If the internet were designed to be fed into language models instead of rendered as visual interfaces for humans, AI would obviously far exceed humans. But for now, language models still need to be retrofitted to our legacy infrastructure.
Robotics is another area where we humans have a home-field advantage. Most tasks in the physical world are designed around fingers and opposable thumbs, which have been pretty hard to build into robots so far. While it is clear that machines can outperform humans in environments optimized for automation, like large-scale manufacturing lines, for now, most of the world is still built for humans. However, these capability gaps are only temporary. There will surely be a day when machines click faster than us and have superhuman general dexterity.
What are the real moats that humans will have? Anything involving private knowledge that language models do not have access to feels like a solid moat to me. Romantic matchmaking and high-end real estate are two examples where inventory is often not advertised publicly and matches are made through being in the right circles. Venture capital is another example—although some research and decision making can be automated with AI, much of success hinges on understanding trends ahead of time and connecting the right people, both of which require private knowledge. While machines can and probably will have increasing access to some types of private knowledge, I think there will still be some types of private knowledge that only humans know. I do not see a path for AI to win when critical knowledge is closely guarded in human circles.
A second area where humans seem to have a real moat is in entertainment and the arts, which are inherently valued for their human aspects regardless of how well machines can do them. Watching Usain Bolt sprint one-hundred meters is beautiful as an expression of the peak of human ability, even though cars can drive much faster. Watching chess at the amateur or intermediate level is more relatable and satisfying than watching two superhuman AIs play each other. The value of art comes from the creation process, which is why replicas are not as valuable as originals. These types of work feel like they will continue to have markets even as we advance towards superintelligence.
More broadly, human presence is a feature that will be, by definition, challenging for AI to automate. For example, a teacher remembering your name or a parent supporting you is valuable even though AI can easily remember your name and probably give better life advice. Someone spending part of a finite life on you counts because their time runs out. As a personal anecdote, I remember the first time I worked with someone who I considered an amazing AI researcher. His advice was solid but what was more important was that I believed I could do great work with him as a collaborator and I raised my own standards. Over the past decades, the development of technology has divided us in some ways, but hopefully AI brings us closer to a world where human presence is reemphasized.
Intelligence has been the defining feature of humans and it will be a big change for AI to automate that over the coming decades. In the near term, certain types of intelligence will become very cheap and automate away old jobs, but the moats I described above will not be the only places where humans can hold value. In the same way that computers took away the jobs of secretaries and manual accountants but created far more jobs via the IT industry, I believe there will be much more demand for services created by productive AI-augmented humans, perhaps for services we cannot yet imagine in today’s society. Just seeing how this story plays out will be an adventure in its own right.
