I have been using RSS to subscribe to Ruanyifeng's Technology Enthusiasts Weekly since a long time ago, and I always look forward to new technological advancements or social news every Friday.
A few days ago, I suddenly realized that I hardly ever visit his website to see if there is any other content. Therefore, I saw his introduction of "Survivors of the Future World" and the translated version of "Hackers and Painters".
I have already read "Hackers and Painters" before, which I found interesting with its focus on entrepreneurship and some thought-provoking articles. However, I have never read the other collection of essays. So, yesterday I downloaded the electronic version of "The Future" and read it on my iPad during my commute.
Our world is indeed developing rapidly. Although AlphaGo appeared around the time the author wrote the book in 2016, not many people were worried about their jobs being replaced by AI in a short period of time. However, after the popularity of chatGPT this year, more and more people have started to think about the question of what kind of jobs will still exist in the future.
The pace of technological advancement far exceeds that of human progress. Therefore, I hope that by reading this book, I can gain new insights into the development of the world from different perspectives and surpass my own known boundaries.
Before I started college in 2010, I searched online for programs that could play Go. At that time, it was widely believed that computers would not be able to master Go in a short period of time. However, just six years later, humans no longer had a chance of winning in the game of Go.
About a year ago, we were still mocking the funny and seemingly useless images generated by generative adversarial network models. But just one year later, both stable diffusion and midjourney can generate high-quality images based on textual prompts, to the point where some amateur artists are worried about their jobs being replaced.
Language has long been a proud product of human evolution. However, the emergence of chatGPT has made people start to wonder if one day human thoughts can also be replaced. Although chatGPT has not shown creativity at present, with the current pace of technological progress, who can guarantee that it won't happen in a year or a few years?
I remember reading a saying before, "Humans are not good at predicting the future, and most predictions about the future are wrong." In the past, the social development of humans was relatively slow, but with the rapid development of technology, predicting the future will become increasingly difficult. It is no longer possible to hope to master a skill and travel the world.
After finishing reading the book, I will excerpt my reading notes and post them as a commemoration.