The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

This is the type of ai that I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. Of course robots will displace many humans doing routine jobs. In a very real sense, machines can best do routine jobs, thus freeing humans for more humane jobs. Unfortunately, many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machines—they are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers. I have my reservations on the fraction of the human population that can be made into programmers in the classical sense; if you call getting money from a bank dispensing “machine programming,” or the dialing of a telephone number (both of which apply the human input to an elaborate program which is then executed, much like an interpreter acts on your program input), then of course most people can be made into programmers. But if you mean the more classical activity of careful analysis of a situation and then the detailed specification as to what is to be done, then I say there are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus. Computers have both displaced so many people from jobs, and also made so many new jobs, it is hopeless to try to answer which is the larger number. But it i...