Li Kaifu: “People ended up on earth not for routine work”

Li Kaifu is a Chinese-Taiwanese venture capitalist and founder of Sinovation Ventures, a venture fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups. Professor Li served as Vice President of Google and President of Google China from 2005-2009, and before that he was a top manager at Microsoft and Apple. In 2013, Time magazine named the AI ​​expert as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. This summer, Kaifu’s book “Superpowers of Artificial Intelligence. China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order.

How will artificial intelligence affect our lives in the near future?

In the next five to ten years, AI will become part of every business: companies will use it as widely as the Internet and data analytics are now. In the longer term, in 30-40 years, AI will change all sectors of the economy and the essence of almost every profession. Yes, people’s needs will remain the same – we need to communicate, have fun, we need family and friends. But let’s remember the story: when electricity became a daily occurrence, cinema became the main entertainment, and not opera or theater, as it was before. With the spread of the Internet, cinemas were gradually empty, and people began to spend time on YouTube. And now we can share short videos on TikTok, where AI is used to target users.

Thanks to AI, all of our basic needs will be met much better, as programs learn to understand what we like, what we really want. But, of course, AI will bring problems with it. For example, it will lead to the disappearance of a lot of jobs, and people will have to undergo retraining to find new ones. But there is also good news. I do not think that we, the people, ended up on this earth in order to devote our lives to routine work. We have higher goals. In fact, the idea that routine work is normal was taught to us by the industrial revolution. In 40 years, we will most likely live in a world where the amount of routine work will be significantly reduced. Yes, in the coming years, people will be annoyed by the need to constantly undergo retraining, but in a few more decades they will be grateful to AI, which freed them from boring, monotonous work. Because now they will be able to do more creative things, they will have time to think about what it means to be human.

The fact that automation will lead to the disappearance of routine work is comforting. But the global economy doesn’t need so many creative jobs. Does this mean that unemployment is inevitable?

It’s not just about creative jobs, it’s also about empathy work. Look, the world’s population is aging. In the US alone, an additional 2 million people in healthcare will be needed over the next five years. This is more than 0,5% of the country’s population! People around the world are aging and need nurses and carers. In addition, there is an urgent need for teachers, doctors, psychologists. There is still a need for good service personnel in restaurants and tourist places, sales specialists – in a word, wherever business is built on a personal relationship between people, even if it is essentially the same routine. Some companies, such as Amazon in the US, are launching retraining programs for former employees to turn warehouse workers and cashiers into healthcare workers.

You are of course right that there are far more routine jobs than those based on creativity and empathy. And yet let’s not forget that thanks to AI, completely new jobs will also appear. Any one of the inventions that drove technological revolutions, be it the steam engine, electricity, or personal computers, ended up creating more jobs than they took away. I am often asked: what exactly will these jobs be? I answer: I don’t know. They tell me: and you call yourself an expert? But who could have predicted 20 years ago that millions of drivers would become Uber drivers? The infrastructure of the mobile Internet, which made it possible to build aggregators, was just being created. The same will happen with artificial intelligence.

And how will the labor market change when artificial intelligence starts to take away creative jobs as well? The time is not far off when he will learn to do almost any job better than people. What will we have then?

I’m not that optimistic. Yes, AI can be taught to draw in the style of Picasso and compose music that will sound like unknown pieces of Mozart. But he cannot do something completely new and truly creative. It can be argued that it will put mediocre musicians and artists out of work. But one aspect of creativity is the ability to solve new problems. Planning, strategic thinking, the ability to explain your ideas to others, the ability to ask good questions – artificial intelligence will not soon learn all this. Look at what I do, look at the work of other people who are focused on management, innovation, technology. All this requires multidisciplinarity and an integrated approach, and this can only be achieved if you are able to think like a person. We do not know when AI will be able to master the human type of thinking.

But if you are right, and it turns out to be so good that it will take any job from people, we will just have to get used to a different way of life. Prior to the industrial revolution, work was not the most important part of human life. But when the development of industry created many jobs where people were engaged in monotonous work, the capitalists began to brainwash people into thinking that work is the meaning of their entire existence. Let’s look for the good: if the robots take all our work away from us, we can spend more time with our families.

What to teach your children in a world where most of the professions that will be popular in the future do not even exist yet?

First, curiosity, critical thinking and creativity. You can’t learn these things from a textbook. They can only be mastered through a learning-by-doing model where students are encouraged to ask questions, question authority, offer solutions that no one has thought of before. It is essentially about the restructuring of education. Secondly, children need to be taught interpersonal skills that allow them to establish connections between people, build trusting relationships, work as a team, and communicate. This is another set of skills that AI cannot master.

Unfortunately, the education system has developed too slowly in recent decades. If we compare today’s entertainment with those of a hundred years ago, we see that they have completely changed. The modern workplace has become very different. Transport has been completely updated. But if you look at a classroom in a regular school, it still looks like a century ago. The same teacher at the blackboard, who essentially reads a sermon to the students. All this is long outdated. We need a model that enhances creativity and empathy. Now schools are focusing on the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics disciplines, teaching programming. That’s good, but we have to remember that AI is already beating humans on reading comprehension tests used in medical school entrance exams. That is, in memorizing textbooks and searching in memory for the correct answer to the questions of the program, a person is easily beaten. We need to take our children and grandchildren to a higher level where creativity and empathy are the foundation of education.

What role will AI play in the transformation of education in the coming years?

As an AI teacher, in many ways, he is better than a human – for example, he does not get tired of giving repetitive lectures, asking questions in an exam, checking homework. This also applies to answers to simple questions, help in improving pronunciation in a foreign language, in mathematics and certain topics in which a particular student does not have time. Today, all this is done by the teacher, who, in addition, must let one or the other student go to the toilet. All these boring chores eat up more than half of his time. If AI were to take care of these day-to-day concerns, it would allow the teacher to focus on the human element of education – to provide warmth to the student, to give self-confidence and the feeling of being helped, to personalize the attitude towards children. When AI takes over the routine, the teacher can truly become a mentor.

How do you feel about the idea of ​​an unconditional basic income? This concept is increasingly discussed in connection with the problem of crowding out people by robots.

I agree that people who have lost their jobs due to automation need help so they can “start over”. But I don’t like the idea of ​​an unconditional basic income – it’s an oversimplified solution to an important problem. If you just give the unemployed a certain amount of money, where is the guarantee that he will spend it on retraining, and not on alcohol or gambling? That is why assistance should be targeted and very thoughtful: you need to understand which specialties will be the most stable, and offer people to retrain for them. It would be much better than an unconditional basic income.