PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel on AI: ‘Going to be much worse for math people’
There will be more opportunities for those with strong verbal skills, Peter Thiel said.
PayPal co-founder and former CEO Peter Thiel warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could impact jobs market severely and roles that require mathematical skills could be at risk. But there will be more opportunities for those with strong verbal skills, Peter Thiel said during an interaction on a talk show.
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He said, “It’s going to be much worse for math people than word people… People have told me that in the next 3-5 years, AI will be able to solve all the US Maths Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit.”
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Pointing out that the Silicon Valley in the 21st century is “way too biased” towards those with math skills, he said that the reason behind such favouritism is not clear owing to which it is “seems deeply unstable” and that’s what he would bet on “getting worse”.
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He said, “People who are going for medical schools are weeded out through physics and calculus. I am not sure if that is really correlated with dexterity in neurosurgery.”
Giving an example of how new technologies are likely to make certain qualities, he said, “I used to have bias towards people with chess skill. I used to test everyone on their chess ability. But it got undermined by the computers in 1997 (IBM’s Deep Blue had defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov). Isn’t that what’s going to happen to math and isn’t that a long overdue rebalance of our society."