WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

WTF? Google AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program, beat the world’s best human Go player, an event that was widely predicted to be at least twenty years in the future—until it happened in 2016. If AlphaGo can happen twenty years early, what else might hit us even sooner than we expect? For starters: An AI running on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer beat a top US Air Force fighter pilot trainer in combat simulation. The world’s largest hedge fund has announced that it wants an AI to make three-fourths of management decisions, including hiring and firing. Oxford University researchers estimate that up to 47% of human tasks, including many components of white-collar jobs, may be done by machines within as little as twenty years.