Serendipity35

In an earlier post, I wrote about the idea of having a job that is future-proof. The book I focused on by Kevin Roose is called Futureproof and it gets me thinking about a number of issues around work. 

We know that some jobs are not future-proof. Producing CDs and DVDs has a brief future. Can all those jobs move to streaming services? No. We have been hearing for a few decades that jobs in the fossil fuel industries will end eventually. Can those job move into alternative fuels? Possibly.

Automation has been the scary thing on the horizon and when it comes to jobs being lost, some will never return. Automation today is more about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Machine learning is emerging as today’s fastest-growing job as the role of automation and AI expands. You should not assume that they are the two names for the same thing.

What is the difference between machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence? They are the same. And they are different.

This is not a simple question to answer. Here are some possible ways to answer.

Machine Learning is an AI technique.

AI is preprogrammed while ML is pre-trained on data. AI is a bigger concept to create intelligent machines that can simulate human thinking capability and behavior, whereas, machine learning is an application or subset of AI that allows machines to learn from data without being programmed explicitly.

AI heuristics is limited while ML discovers, evolves, and transcends the human ability to pre-program.

In education, we might call ML reinforcement learning.

AI is a bigger concept to create intelligent machines that can simulate human thinking capability and behavior, whereas, machine learning is an application or subset of AI that allows machines to learn from data without being programmed explicitly.

AI is an umbrella term with applications varying from text analysis to robotics.

AI is about decision-making based on available data. We see it in self-driving cars, virtual personal assistants, calculating business investment risks, or examining medical samples and test results.

AI does human intelligence tasks but faster and with a reduced error rate.

Machine learning makes software applications more accurate in predicting outcomes without having to be specially programmed.

ML is an application of artificial intelligence that automatically learns and improves over time when exposed to new data.

If you were studying in order to get a future-proofed job, you probably should study AI, ML and Data Science. They are inextricably intertwined.