There’s all this talk that robots will replace humans in the workplace, leaving us poor, redundant schmucks with nothing to do but embrace the glorious (yet terrifying) creative potential of opiates and ennui. (Let it be noted that bumdom was all the rage in the 19th century, leading to the surging ecstasies of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the crown priest of hermeticism (and my all-time favorite poet besides Sappho*), Stéphane Mallarmé**).

As I’ve argued in a previous post, I think that’s bollocks. But I also think it’s worth thinking about what cognitive, services-oriented jobs could and should look like in the next 20 years as technology advances. Note that I’m restricting my commentary to professional services work, as the manufacturing, agricultural, and transportation (truck and taxi driving) sectors entail a different type of work activity and are governed by different economic dynamics. They may indeed be quite threatened by emerging artificial intelligence…

Nothing sounds more futuristic than artificial intelligence (AI). Our predictions about the future of AI are largely shaped by science fiction. Go to any conference, skim any WIRED article, peruse any gallery of stock images depicting AI*, and you can’t help but imagine AI as a disembodied cyberbabe (as in Spike Jonze’s Her), a Tin Man (who just wanted a heart!) gone rogue (as in the Terminator), or, my personal favorite, a brain out-of-the-vat-like-a-fish-out-of-water-and-into-some-non-brain-appropriate-space-like-a-robot-hand-or-an-android-intestine (as in Krang in the Ninja Turtles).

A legit AI marketing photo!

Krang should be the AI mascot, not the Terminator!

The truth is, AI looks more like this:

A slide from Pieter Abbeel’s lecture at MILA’s Reinforcement Learning Summer School.

Of course, it takes domain expertise to picture just what kind of embodied AI product such formal mathematical equations would create. Visual art, argued Gene Kogan, a cosmopolitan coder-artist, may just be the best…