Mirza Yawar Baig – IR vs AI
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious,
the Ever Merciful.
Peace and blessings be upon the Messengers and
Prophets of Allah, Muhammad and the Messenger of
Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and
his family and companions.
Next, my brothers and sisters, we have been
talking over the last two days about global
change.
And I spoke to you in the last
two days about the changes that the Industrial
Revolution brought.
And how these changes, even though we call
it the Industrial Revolution, and obviously it had
to do with industry and manufacture and so
on, but the big changes had nothing to
do with industry and manufacture, they had to
do with ethics and values and morals and
culture.
Today I want to talk to you about
the one, the revolution that we are now
living in.
Which is the IT, AI industry, technology and
artificial intelligence, that revolution.
And let's see what that scenario, that places
for us.
Now, before we say what does it mean
for us, we have to ask, where am
I standing?
You know, it's like looking at a coin.
If you hold a coin vertical like this,
the person on that side of the coin
will see the head, and the other side
of the coin will see the tail, the
number.
Right?
You can't see both sides of the coin
at the same time, you see this side
and this side.
So what the AI revolution means depends on
where we stand.
From one side, you will see, and you
are seeing, hugely enhanced productivity and speed of
technology.
For example, just to give you an idea,
the computers which put Apollo 11 on the
moon had less computing power than this phone.
Not my particular phone, I mean any smartphone.
Those computers were less powerful than this one.
So that's the kind of exponential increase in
speed and computing capability that we already have
in our hands.
The problem is most of us are not
aware of what we have.
We're just using it mindlessly, we've got a
gadget to use it, we don't even know
what we're doing with it.
So, from the one side, you will see
hugely enhanced productivity and speed of response, superior
healthcare.
For example, IBM Watson, which was one of
the first of the AI-based programs that
came out, around 2010, 2011, something like this.
IBM Watson in oncology alone, the diagnosis of
cancer, IBM Watson could do it, I can't
even remember how many multiples they talked about,
but like 10,000 times faster than any
oncologist, right?
Much faster and far more accurately than any
cancer specialist.
So you're going to see superior healthcare with
even more accurate diagnostic and intervention ability.
We already have robotic surgery, you will get
more and more of it.
Don't be surprised, especially the younger ones, you
are going to see a time when there
will be no doctors, there will be no
surgeons, there will be no human beings in
the operation theatre.
A robot will shuttle you in there and
then other machines will work on you when
you're out of there.
There will be a huge drop in cost
of product and service manufacture and delivery because
everything will be automated.
There will be, of course, enhanced safety.
For example, self-driving trucks will be far
safer than trucks or cars driven by people.
Speed of travel will be much greater.
Individual independence and leisure, and I'm talking now
theory, will be much higher, much more.
There will be high mobility, for example, even
now, even now as we speak, depending on
what, unless you are working on a particular
machine in a factory, you are not bound
to any geographic location in the world.
You can live anywhere you like.
You can live anywhere you like.
Just yesterday I read a report of this
couple who have spent the last 10 years
continuously on cruise ships.
They just live on cruise ships.
And funny thing is that they are spending
about $10,000 a year living on cruise
ships, meaning no laundry, no housekeeping, everything is
taken care of, food is taken care of,
right?
You are living on a cruise ship, you've
got a free gym, you've got a free
swimming pool, air conditioning, heating, you name it,
all of this, $10,000 a year.
Sound good, right?
They're doing it right now.
Locationally you are not bound to any place,
you can be anywhere.
I know people who spend, they say we
are chasing the sun.
So they live in RVs, caravans, very fancy
ones, I've seen some beautiful ones.
They're living on the RV, they're driving the
RV, and they're going from the south, southernmost
part of the United States all the way
to the northernmost part of Canada, going with
the weather.
Whatever weather you want, you want warmer, colder,
you go with the weather.
And you work from your RV.
So you are doing projects, you are doing
all kinds of stuff, sitting in your RV.
We have it already.
The point I'm making is we already have
this.
I'm not even talking about the future here.
Then there will be free availability of knowledge
and skill development opportunities.
Again, that is already available.
A chat GPT, other more advanced forms of
AI, they have opened the doors to things
like scenario planning.
What is likely to happen five years from
now in Asia, in the area of white
-scoots manufacture, home appliance manufacture.
For that, how should we prepare?
If you live in the corporate world like
I do, these are very common questions which
we ask for corporate planning.
And then, of course, remote control of processes
through the internet, drones for different uses, surveillance,
facial recognition, mind-steering through news and views
and deepfake videos.
Manipulation of people through all of this, all
of which is happening as we speak.
Transportation, as I mentioned already, self-driven cars,
trucks, planes.
We have drones already, so to have a
plane without a pilot is nothing new, or
nothing amazing.
So AI offers amazing productivity in all kinds
of applications and situations, ranging from natural language
processing, just to give you an idea.
Today, if you want to learn a new
language, you have to make the effort, and
depending on the language, it takes you months
to years.
Right now, as I speak, we have technology
where you put on your earphones, headphones, and
you give a set of headphones to the
person you are talking to.
That person talks, for example, in Arabic.
I'm hearing him in English, and I will
reply in English, and he hears me in
Arabic.
So no need to learn any language.
Any language you want, that contraption has like
200 languages in it.
So you walk off a plane in any
country, and you are speaking to the local
people in their local language, without spending five
minutes to learn their language.
That technology, we have it already.
Sometimes it makes a little bit of mistakes,
some grammatical, but who cares?
And as time goes, it will just get
more and more and more, you know, AI
learning will make it just more and more
accurate.
So it's just a matter of time, and
that also not too much time.
Now the question is, what does it mean
for us?
It means that if you are in any
job that a machine can do, then you
are looking at the door, because the machine
will do it.
Right?
Education system.
Even today, as I speak, we really don't
need schools.
We don't need textbooks.
Textbooks is dumbing down knowledge anyway.
There's nothing remotely good about a textbook.
You should go to the source books.
Textbooks will dumb down the stuff, just make
it boring and useless.
So you don't need them anyway.
Even today, you don't need teachers.
You need to be literate.
Literacy and numeracy, you need to read, and
you need to know numbers.
Once you read, once you can read, once
you know numbers, knowledge is open to you.
Right today, if you just go and Google
search on, there's an organization called EBSCO, E
-B-S-C-O, which gives you free
research databases, which are available, you will be
surprised at what a variety of databases of
knowledge is available to you, practically anything under
the sun, you want to study, you will
study.
Right?
So people will have the freedom to study
anything they want, and then offer their services
and products, and create products and become entrepreneurs
on their own.
College degrees, especially when they cost as much
as they do in this country, will become
redundant.
Nobody will care about your degree.
Who wants to know your degree?
If I'm hiring you for something, if I'm
hiring you to repair my car, I don't
care about some piece of paper you're carrying,
just do it.
Right?
I have an MBA from the number one
business school in India, which was set up
by Harvard Business School.
But no one ever asked to see my
certificate.
Who cares?
They don't care about the certificate.
They want to know, can you help me
in my company?
And if I can help them in my
company, they don't care if I'm a monkey's
grandfather.
What is it to them?
They want a job to be done.
The only requirement for all this is that
you should read.
I'm telling you what is there.
That database, no matter how big and beautiful
it is, it is not going to jump
out of the internet and enter your mind
by itself.
You must read.
So my usual question to all of you,
how many books did you read this year?
For the parents here, what I'm saying to
you is serious bad news.
Serious, serious bad news.
Do some sleep.
Because your generation gap with your children, today
it's a gap, tomorrow it will become a
gulf.
It will become the Indian Ocean between India
and Mozambique.
Right?
You will be like you are talking to
people from another planet in your own house.
You have to read.
Now from the other side, everything has two
sides.
On the other side, the bigger question which
people forget or ignore is, what will you,
you meaning governments, do with people when you
continuously invent and invest in technologies which don't
need people?
But the people are still there.
They have needs.
They vote.
They have responsibilities.
They can rebel and they do.
What then?
The difference between the Industrial Revolution and the
AI revolution is that in the Industrial Revolution,
they needed people but with different skills.
How to ride a horse was not important.
How to run a machine became important.
Despite that, one entire generation went into the
ground because re-skilling is not as simple
as they make it sound.
In the AI revolution, they don't need people
at all.
And all the re-skilling spiel they tell
you is a load of rubbish because automation
is not about having the same people doing
things differently but of having fewer to know
people at all.
Now if you don't believe me, just go
on, it's all on Google, right?
Just go and look up Tesla's super factory
in California, see what it looks like.
That happened.
There's not even one human being in that
whole floor.
They're producing cars, thousands of cars.
Or look at one of the Amazon super
warehouses with drones flying inside to pinpoint the
item that they want to take out and
they have robots which go and take it
out.
You have robots which are unloading trucks and
stacking shelves.
Self-driving trucks, for example, big thing, self
-driving cars, self-driving trucks.
Sounds like very fancy technology, right?
Tesla has it already.
I mean, if you drive a Tesla, put
it on self-drive, it'll take you.
It takes you, it stops you, it speeds
up and overtakes and it does the works.
But self-driving trucks, which mean faster turnaround
time for the truck because there's no driver
to take a rest and whatnot, safer roads
because the machine doesn't make mistakes, faster transport
of goods, higher profit margins, but for who?
For the companies, for the business owners.
Now, in America alone, there are 5 million
truck drivers, 5 million.
Now, multiply that by 6 because take a
family, average family size of 5, you're looking
at 30 million people.
Those 30 million people, they have to pay
for housing, for education, for food, for health
care and all the host of things that
are required to raise a family.
Who pays for that?
So, for the truck driver, who is today
making maybe 80,000, 90,000, 100,000
a year, a self-driving truck is a
death warrant.
I'm not joking.
I have seen this myself.
I used to head a travel company in
Delhi in 1994, 93.
And that is when they brought in the
automated ticketing system called Galileo.
So, before that, we had, for ticketing, we
had something called the ABC book.
It was a huge, fat, like a telephone
directory, but like four times the size of
a telephone directory, big, fat book like this.
So, when I joined the company as the
head, I asked them, I said, I want
to learn how to do ticketing.
They said, why should you?
You're the chairman.
I said, no, no, no, I want to
know what people are doing because the ticketing,
what they used to call the ticketing consultant
or some fancy name, they were like prima
donnas.
They could write their own salaries because if
that ticketing person walked away, you had no
business.
Now, a very, very good ticketing person, if
you gave them an itinerary over traveling over,
you know, five, six countries and asked them
to give you some options and routing, they
would take about two to three days and
they would give you, if they would give
you one route or if they were very
good, they would give you two, two options.
Galileo came and Galileo would give you six
options in three minutes.
So, overnight, these jobs, which were very, very
prime jobs and people making money and dictating
terms, went out of the window, gone, overnight,
literally.
The company installs the system, next morning, you
have no job.
Because your job can be done by anybody
at all.
Absolutely anybody who's never seen a plane in
their life, they can run a whole travel
company.
And those books were nice if you were
vertically challenged.
If you were short, then you would put
the book and sit on it.
That was the only use for the book.
So, this worldview that I'm talking about is
because this is very real and it is
very frightening and it is highly likely, very,
very likely.
I want to say certain, but I don't
want to say certain.
Next installment of frightening news in my...
There's more of this stuff.
We ask Allah to help us to prepare.
We ask Allah to help us to change
our mindsets, to love learning, to come and
open our eyes, to see the world as
it is and to prepare ourselves and not
to get caught and trapped and trashed.
We don't want that, right?
And we don't want this for our children
either.
So, we ask Allah for the wisdom and
the hikmah to learn and to benefit from
that, inshallah.
And peace and blessings be upon the Prophet
and his family.