Hey, it's Bernie!

Today I started my course in Data Science and AI at NTU, hoping to have a better understanding on how AI works behind the scenes so that I can move forward into this brave new world with open eyes.

The lecturer mentioned something interesting. He said that the technical elements of the course is easy, as we can always use AI to assist us in getting those answers. The real challenge is not “what we learn”, but “how we learn”.

Which got me thinking about how knowledge and our access to it has evolved through the past few decades. They say “Knowledge is Power”, and I still believe this. I was born in an era where TV, radio and textbooks were sources of knowledge. Then the Internet came along, and suddenly we had free access to knowledge from all over the world. When we don't know the answer, we “Google it”. If you were to absorb all of the world's knowledge on the Internet you would be unstoppable. But that was impossible.

So now we are on the journey as a human race to create the ultimate knowledge machine, not only to digest all of the world's knowledge, it will also help categorise, summarise, and explain. If we feed this machine enough knowledge, it can take over what we have spent our lifetimes doing – categorise, summarise and explain knowledge. If knowledge is power, then who eventually will have the power?

How will we fit into this brave new world of knowledge superiority? I believe we will become “knowledge switches”. This term is taken from various industries like networking, and trains, where a switch controls the flow of data, or control the direction of the tracks. As knowledge switches we will take the knowledge flowing from the source aka the oracle of AI, and channel it to the change we seek to make.

So this changes how we need to behave in the acquisition of knowledge, we will no longer be rewarded for the access of knowledge, but how well we can control the flow of knowledge into our industries. The ones who do that effectively will succeed.