When it comes to Artificial Intelligence and money, I don’t want any part of it. Look at what a four-year-old can do that a supercomputer can’t.
You know Peter Thiel as one of the few people in Silicon Valley who backed presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Thiel was also a co-founder of PayPal with some guy named Elon Musk. And he was an original backer of Facebook. The guy knows a thing or two about startups. Which is why I recently reread his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
You and I know that technologists tend to think about the future in terms of technology, much like a farmer thinks about the future in terms of farming. It’s what they do. Which is why, as an investor, I found this passage interesting and worthy of your attention. Here it is:
To understand the scale of this variance, consider another of Google’s computer-for-human substitution projects. In 2012, one of their supercomputers made headlines when, after scanning 10 million thumbnails of YouTube videos, it learned to identify a cat with 75% accuracy. That seems impressive—until you remember that an average four-year-old can do it flawlessly. When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks but even a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other—they’re categorically different.
Action Line: With all the talk about Artificial Intelligence and Robin Hoods, when it comes to your MONEY, it’s important to REMEMBER: A four-year-old can do flawlessly what supercomputers can’t.
