The word “weird” doesn’t always mean strange. In Old English, derived from a mixture of Germanic and Norse concepts, its meaning was closer to “fate” or “to be” or even “destiny.” There was a time when humans in that culture believed that how one’s life would unfold was inseparable from the fundamental weirdness of being alive.
william shakespeare macbeth Known for the three witches who popularized "Double, double, toil and trouble” This phrase is often misquoted in its occurrence disney cartoon for “bubbles,bubbles“. But what people often forget is that Shakespeare named these characters “strange sisters,” connecting them to another mythical group of three crones: the Norns of Scandinavian mythology, who together weave a web of destiny called (what else?) the “wyrd”, which contains the story of each person’s life. (JK Rowling later named a pop band in her book harry potter universe”strange sisters,” but that was an all-male lineup.)
Benjamin Shiller, an economics professor at Brandeis University, said that the strangest thing in economics is that in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), weirdness is closely related to destiny. The weirder you are, he told Fortune, the better off you’ll be.
In his new book “The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: How technology is changing jobs, markets, lives, and our futureSchiller believes that the weirder your job, the less likely an AI will be able to accept it. Shiller is an expert on the economics of technological change and the son of a famous economist. Robert Shiller of Yale Universityco-creator National House Price Index Shearer tells us that it is still used today wealth The future of employment is strange.
“AI models can learn things very well, but only if they require a lot of training data because humans learn much more efficiently,” Shearer said. “If you have a niche area and don’t have a lot of data to train an AI model on, then AI probably won’t replace your job.”
Goldman Sachs predict 300 million jobs in the United States and Europe may be affected to some extent by artificial intelligence, which indicates that humans may become the main force in the modern economy. Schiller’s “weird premium,” however, hints at a cheat code for gaming AI takeover: finding a job so complex that not even trillions of data can replace it.
The learning efficiency of artificial intelligence is not as good as that of humans…
What did Schiller describe? Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently made suggestions about the vast amounts of information needed to replace human skills. The businessman replied on X (formerly Twitter): “Approximately 10 billion miles of training data are needed to achieve safe unsupervised autonomous driving.”
“If a typical American drives about 13,500 miles per year, they would need training data equivalent to someone driving for about 750,000 years,” Shiller said. By comparison, the average person only needs to drive a few hundred miles and practice for six months to get a driver’s license.
Of course, self-driving cars already exist and can safely transport people from point A to point B with ease. However, if AI requires this much data to learn a simple task like driving, it will likely require vast amounts of data to automate niche occupations, such as aviation accident analysts or industrial amusement engineers. In other words, in areas where data is scarce, humans retain a comparative advantage.
Humans are better at dealing with kangaroos
Schiller illustrates the limitations of artificial intelligence with the “kangaroo example,” a cautionary tale for Waymo as it tests its self-driving cars in Australia. These vehicles failed to pass strange alien obstacles: jumping marsupial. “They basically just kept bumping into kangaroos because kangaroos were not in their training data and their movements were different from those of other animals.”
AI cannot predict the unknown, and this failure is what separates humans from the most advanced machines. “For humans, we are able to adapt and handle these edge cases without having to be specifically trained to handle them,” Shearer said. We are naturally adept at handling niche scenarios, from the unpredictability of roads to the chaos of hospitals or investment banks.
Schiller said modern workers, as well as young people considering pursuing a degree, should avoid falling into a career that everyone else is doing. “Just taking standard courses and becoming proficient in what these large majors teach directly is a risky strategy,” Shearer said.
In other words, your destiny is destined to be strange.