Love And Compassion Will Save Us When AI Takes Our Jobs

The advent of AI is often discussed as something of a selective guillotine falling on our employment ecosystem: Either your job is knocked out, or its spared. But Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google, Apple, and Microsoft employee turned venture capitalist with a speciality in artificial intelligence, sees a more humanistic way to integrate AI into our economies. Lee, during the height of his career, put work above all else, he tells the audience at TED 2018 in Vancouver. He nearly left his wife's side as she was giving birth to their daughter in order to give a presentation on early AI in 1991, and it wasn't uncommon for him to work what in China is called "9/9/6"–from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. As he worked on artificial intelligence systems, he thought of them as ways to streamline routine work to create more room for innovation, and his job, as one of the early developers of these technologies, was to innovate faster and better to support this future.