Don’t miss the AI Boom! It is happening now!
Welcome ! I’m Sabrina E.Bouker, a computer scientist with a focus on AI Literacy, lecturer at Open University, and mum of two small children. This letter is about raising Intelligent humans in the era of Artificial Intelligence. Thank you for being here.
AI and the golden rush
As a bored and nonchalant computer sciences student in the late nineties, one day, I stumbled upon a documentary showcasing a young teenage girl from the US earning very good money by building websites for local shops!
Inspired, I got some books from the library and started to develop my first website. It was all pink, all cranky, but it was working… well, on my localhost, a.k.a. my local computer.
I had no idea how to host it on the internet, nor did I understand what a domain name was or how to buy it… more importantly, I had no idea why local shops would pay a huge amount of money to put their websites out there on the “Internet”? … that would take ages to load, using a phone on an analogue connection to access it… Is this even a thing? What’s the point?
The main point is that, although I had managed to gain some technical knowledge about building a website, I was not able to understand the vision of a global internet network that would allow millions of buyers and sellers to connect online – Thus, I have missed the opportunity that the young American teenager was capitalising on.
I did not have any vision or any in-depth understanding of the whole ecosystem that was leading to the Internet BOOM.
It goes without saying that those who understood it early enough to take advantage of it have done extremely well financially but also on a personal level; you know, the Bezos, the Musks… etc.
Today, it is happening again
the AI Boom, or more specifically the GenAI Boom. Somewhere in the world, there are young adults and teenagers studying and exploring GenAI; some of them will grasp the vision, the ecosystem that will eventually lead them to an explosive success and wealth, while others will not, as happened to me during the Internet BOOM.
However, today, there are two mental conceptions about AI: The first is that AI will eventually outperform humans and replace them. Personally, I don’t believe in this, I’m more inclined to the second idea, which sees AI as an incredible tool that is already augmenting everyday humans with huge capabilities, in the workplace, in studying, in innovations, and in businesses.
For me, this is the real danger — those who will understand and use AI will see their capabilities hugely augmented in an unprecedented manner; they will outperform their peers who don’t.
That’s why having access to AI Literacy is extremely crucial for the next generation, and for all of us!
So, don’t miss the AI BOOM; get yourself involved, educated, and, more importantly, get the next generation hooked and involved.
AI Versus GenAI
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AI – Artificial Intelligence is the umbrella term for all the technologies and algorithms that have attempted over time to make machines execute tasks generally attributed to humans.
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ML– Machine Learning is a subfield of AI that is about different techniques to make machines learn new information, without human intervention.
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DL– Deep Learning is a subfield of Machine Learning that uses techniques to mimic how the human brain works, to learn from data and produce predictions.
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GenAI– Generative AI, uses Deep Learning techniques to produce new content based on the learned data.
All the excitement nowadays is mainly about how GenAI is changing the way we interact with computing. Ie, ChatGPT’s abilities to produce software on the fly without any prior knowledge in programming! (ChatGpt, Gemini…etc)
My Current Reading
I’m currently reading “From the Child King to The Tyrannical Child.” The book is in French; though the title seems a bit controversial, it is full of insights. I will share more about it in my future letters.
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