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This article captures my thoughts on AI, creative work, and parenting (especially kids’ education) after binging two insightful video summaries by Chinese YouTuber “Da Fei.” These videos distilled key points from interviews with two tech Giants: AI “Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
As a parent of two boys, my immediate concern (among the many topics covered in these discussions) was AI’s impact on human intelligence and the future job market. After I enjoy Da Fei’s videos, I immediately went back to the original interviews. One is conducted by the channel The Diary of a CEO: Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton , another is produced by famous YouTuber Lex Fridman, who interviewed Sundar Pichai My goal was to wrap my head around this inevitable AI-driven world so I could prepare myself to face the age of AI with my kids.
First thing that attracted me was Hinton’s insights on the contrast between biological intelligence (humans!) and digital intelligence (AI). Hinton argued the latter has already surpassed the former in many areas. For instance:
- AI can be copied and shared instantly, while human knowledge is lost when a person dies.
- AI systems can transfer and synchronize knowledge at speeds and volumes far beyond human capability (AI can transmit trillions of bits per second, while humans communicate at about 10 bits per second).
For Hinton, AI surpassing human intelligence in all cognitive tasks is an inevitable future. After all, AI already knows far more than any individual human in most fields. And in the future, even areas where humans currently excel will be overtaken. AI’s creativity might even surpass ours, as it can find analogies and compress information in ways that require deep understanding. Thus, Hinton claimed in the interview, as AI takes over more cognitive work, human intelligence may lose its economic value, just as physical strength did during the industrial revolution.
As if to underscore Hinton’s point, Da Fei concluded his video by relaying an audience’s comment about his personal experience: after ten years as a freelance writer, he lost his job due to the rise of AI and failed in several attempts to switch careers, eventually working to train AI. Even after learning programming, he found AI’s progress too fast—by the time he could graduate, entry-level jobs would be gone. With chronic illness preventing physical work, he could only struggle with gig jobs, feeling lost and powerless about the future. He worries about ending up homeless and believes that in the AI era, many people will struggle to find a foothold, while social inequality remains hard to change.I’ve included the original story at the end of this piece (1). Those few hundred words are truly heartbreaking to read.
At the end of that online comment, the writer stated, “The future is bleak. I’ve tried to survive this huge wave, but there’s nothing I can do. The market only needs a few plumbers.” A plumber, ironically, is precisely the example Hinton gave for a job likely to remain safe in the AI era. Hinton believes AI will easily surpass humans in cognitive labor, but a plumber’s job involves using complex tools and adapting to unpredictable situations. Designing and building such robots is far beyond current technological capabilities and would be incredibly expensive. So, when will the “plumber’s job is safer than other cognitive labor” scenario actually arrive? From Hinton’s words, it sounds like it will come with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
How Much Time Do We Have?
Not as much as we might hope, it seems! According to both Hinton and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, AGI is estimated to arrive in the next 10 to 20 years, or shortly after 2030. Simply put, AGI will be AI that can understand and perform all human cognitive functions and tasks, not just be confined to specific areas like current AI.
AGI’s arrival will bring monumental changes to human society, especially the labor market. Both Hinton and Pichai believe that a vast number of traditional jobs – especially routine office, creative, and professional roles (like writing, customer service, legal work, and even some medical tasks) – will be replaced by AGI. While new job opportunities are supposed to emerge, honestly, even these two big shots haven’t offered much concrete info on what those new jobs will actually look like. Anyway, by 2030, Hinton will be quite elderly, and Pichai’s job is probably safe for a while longer. (Lucky him!)
As someone currently raising two biological intelligence units (a.k.a. my sons), all this talk felt like a sudden, cold splash of water to the face. It was like an investment guru telling me I’d heavily invested in two junk stocks. So, is my only option to focus on training my boys to become plumbers? Are there no other opportunities?
AJI: Our Buffer Zone
Pichai used the term AJI (Artificial Jagged Intelligence) to describe AI’s current phase. He noted that while current AI can perform some tasks at or above human levels (like language translation or image recognition), it still makes surprisingly simple mistakes—think basic math errors or completely misunderstanding context. This “jagged” progress means AI’s abilities are uneven across different tasks, like a spiky graph.
Personally, I see this current AJI era as a buffer zone for humanity as we shepherd our young ones into the full-blown AI age. After all, today’s AI isn’t quite that powerful yet, and it still has obvious flaws. My two sons often joke that AI stands for “artificial idiot.” So, I believe this period gives us a unique opportunity—perhaps the first in human history—to step out of our “smartest species” comfort zone and truly rethink what “human” and “humanity” really mean.
On this point, Pichai, as a prominent figure in industry and business, appears far more positive and optimistic than Hinton, the academic. When Lex Fridman asked Pichai: “If you build AGI, what kind of question would you ask it? What would you want to talk about? Definitively, Google has created AGI that can basically answer any question. What topic are you going to? Where are you going?”
Pichai’s answer was: “I think if I were to ask it, I think it’ll help us understand ourselves much better in a way that’ll surprise us, I think…So you talking to AGI, I think there is some chance it’ll understand you in a very deep way, I think in a profound way, that’s a possibility. I think there is also the obvious thing of maybe it helps us understand the universe better in a way that expands the frontiers of our understanding of the world. That is something super exciting.”
Educational research is also buzzing with studies on how to navigate this imperfect AI environment and explore the human-AI relationship. New concepts are popping up everywhere, like:
- AI literacy
- AI fluency
- UNESCO’s AI competency framework
- Studies on the relationship between AI and human high-order thinking
I’ll be digging into these studies bit by bit and sharing my thoughts from a parent’s perspective. Hopefully, we can even explore some of these ideas together in our own homes!
Let me share a line from an anime protagonist that perfectly sums up my personal take on AI: “If you move forward, you gain two. If you run, you gain one.” (2)
If we refuse to engage out of fear, we lose the chance to understand and coexist. That’s when biases and conspiracy theories creep in. The best way to understand something new is always to just try it.
So, during this AJI “buffer zone,” beyond just teaching our kids how to fix a leaky faucet, I’m much more inclined to embrace AI alongside them. Let’s explore new possibilities together, venturing into the unknown to find new ways for biological and digital intelligence to coexist.
AI Assistance Note: This article was translated from Chinese, then polished and improved in writing style with the help of Gemini.
P.S. (1) The original story: The writer said that he was originally a freelance writer and had done it for ten years, but lost his job because of the emergence of AI. He tried various career changes, but all were interrupted, as AI was destroying the creative market. After that, he struggled among various gig jobs and eventually found a job training AI. He thought that moving into the tech field would help, so he started learning more about AI and even went back to school to study programming last year. However, he soon realized that AI was learning much faster than he could. So he chose to drop out, unwilling to spend more money on education, because by the time he graduated, all entry-level positions might have already been replaced by AI, and what he learned in school would be far behind the technological frontier.
Now, he doesn’t know what else he can do. He has decades of chronic illness and can’t do physical labor, so maybe he can only drift for another year or two, and when AI can train itself, he’ll be laid off again. By then, the job market may be even tougher, as there will be many more unemployed people like him. He foresees himself eventually ending up homeless, dying in a ditch. Every time he thinks about the future, he can’t help but fall into deep depression. Although he knows AI is indeed useful and has great positive potential, the reality is that achieving universal basic income through AI is almost impossible. In the end, he laments that AI will not change the fatal flaws in human nature, such as greed, arrogance, and selfishness. Those in power will squeeze everything they can, while the rest will go hungry. The future is bleak; he has always tried to survive in this huge wave, but feels powerless, as the market only needs a few plumbers.
(2) This line comes from Suletta Mercury, the main character of the Gundam anime series The Witch from Mercury. (Full disclosure: It’s probably the worst Gundam series I’ve ever watched, and Suletta’s character development was a train wreck. So, yes, this quote feels pretty hollow and out of place given the context!)