How Today’s Readings Led Me to AI Superpowers

I love to reflect the journey on how I discovered things (which include ideas, theories, although most of the time people) that enlighten me, inspire me, engage me, which then led me or connect me to another dot, especially when I landed on someone successful that made me really curious about him/her, made me believe in him/her; essentially follow him/her online just to go through his/her mind/work/everyday lives. The latter sounds like I’m a stalker, but you get my point right? For example, how I ended up admiring Fred Wilson which then led me to starting this blog, how I ended up admiring Melinda Gates for her work on data and women empowerment, and many many more. I actually have a list.

Today, I discovered another person that will be in my “stalking” list. He is Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese VC and most importantly an AI expert. In his capacity as an AI expert, he wrote a book called AI Superpowers where he focuses on how AI will save humanity and how humans can take advantage of AI instead of risking our jobs to AI.

So how I discovered him? It’s through The Algorithm newsletter I subscribed because I enjoy reading Karen Hao’s views (MIT Technology Review journalist). In this week’s newsletter she mentioned about how TikTok, the upcoming and rising social media platform (from China) is replacing our free will with algorithms. I got really curious about this famous app after learning that Andreessen Horowitz thinks this app is unique as it is the first AI consumer-based app. Even people in the US is crazy about it and it has 500m users already! I’m trying to understand the difference that this app offers vs. Other social media platforms which leverage on AI to curate what customers wants/needs. Apparently for TikTok, the product itself is based on AI. Anyway this is another story for another day.

From the newsletter, I clicked on Andreessen Horowitz’s blog to read about their take on TikTok and the rise of AI-based consumer apps. You can read it here. At the end of his post, the general partner of Andreessen Horowitz mentioned about the book called AI Superpowers, written by Kai-Fu Lee. Googled about it and found the author’s website and got immediately hooked.

Apart from his in-depth knowledge on AI, he also shared a quiz for us to take to see if our job is at risk of being replaced by AI and learn about our own human superpowers so that we can thrive in the future. I thought it was a great quiz and would highly recommend everyone to take it. Here’s my results:

PHEW!

The assessment about me is actually quite accurate I would say. And apparently it says I have a spontaneous personality which possesses characteristics that AI can’t imitate. See below.