Milken Asia Summit: Humanity Will Power the AI Revolution
Beryl Li recently joined Razer’s Jeff Chau, Transcend’s Brett Krause, Baobab Studios’ Maureen Fan, and 1AM Gaming’s Gregory Milken to discuss AI’s impact on gaming.
A 2020 report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted that although AI would phase out over 85 million jobs in the next five years, 94 million new roles would emerge. Through its newly launched Future of Work program, YGG is enabling its community to uncover new economic opportunities driven by this emerging technology. During Season 6 of the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), the YGG community caught a glimpse of what these ad hoc opportunities could look like through AI bounty quests.
At the sidelines of TOKEN2049, YGG co-founder Beryl Li was invited to speak at the Milken Asia Summit and share more about YGG’s latest initiative. Best known for its pragmatic, data-driven approach to uncovering solutions to real-world problems, the Milken Institute is an independent economics think tank that attracts a diverse range of philanthropists and leaders across several industries, disciplines, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Beryl spoke on the panel “AI-Powered Gaming: Redefining the Global Landscape,” joining leaders from different sectors of the gaming industry for an in-depth discussion on how AI is shaping the future of gaming. Beryl sat with Jeff Chau, the Global Esports Director for gaming lifestyle and hardware brand Razer, Brett Krause, Managing Director for the gaming and entertainment venture fund Transcend, Maureen Fan, CEO and co-founder of the digital animation studio Baobab Studios, and Gregory Milken, Managing Director for the gaming-focused venture fund 1AM Gaming.
The following is an excerpt from their conversation, where Beryl and Maureen speak on the potential impact of AI on the job markets of tomorrow. They highlight that despite concerns about the roles it may make redundant, AI holds the potential to create new jobs in the coming years while boosting productivity and efficiency across industries.
Milken Asia Summit: AI-Powered Gaming Redefining the Global Landscape
Gregory (32:15): AI is only as good as the data sets it has, the algorithms. Is there anything here that the gaming industry team can contribute back to AI?
Beryl (32:31): This is where humans are much more relevant and important in creating the right AI. You need human help to really reinforce learning within datasets. You need humans to take the sample and make sure that it has no biases. From there, you still need humans. When you have that data set, you also need humans to clean up the data and remove all the inconsistencies from your data set. And then you sort that data, categorize that data, and you’ll still need humans to define that.
When you go through that process, it doesn't mean anything. It's very raw. You need humans to process this data and refine it and reinforce that learning, push it out. When that happens, what humans will be doing is checking out whether the model is good or not and making readjustments within the model, personalizing it for cultural nuances or ethics. This is where humans become much more important.
There has always been fear that AI might take away jobs. But in our case within YGG, I really believe that there's going to be a shift, with tasks. What we want to do is really gamify the experience of sorting out data, labeling data, and providing people this experience to upskill themselves. So for example, moderators for Discord channels or social channels for games, you could actually launch an AI agent and as a moderator, you still need to reinforce that learning within your AI agent to act like you. To be able to do that, you need to spend more time until you reach that optimal efficiency with your AI model.
So if you get paid as a moderator like $10 per hour for eight hours, that’s 80 bucks. Then your AI model can run and what you have to do is just spend an hour looking after it. Seven hours out of eight hours, you could just spend time learning something new or getting a massage, right? But you still get paid for it. So I think that this is how AI could benefit humans, but at the same time, humans are needed to refine our AI models.
Gregory (35:55): What jobs do you think are at risk or can be created?
Maureen (36:05): With every technological disruption, there's jobs that are eliminated at the same time they're created. Those that are going to have an advantage are those who know how to use tools. So the advice to everybody in the creative industry right now, would be to download every single AI you possibly could use, and learn the crap out of all of them, so that you are the expert, especially for new grads coming in.
So instead of doing UV mapping when you first join a company, which is really boring stuff, you get to do more creative stuff right away. But of course, there's going to be fewer jobs for sure. So right now we see efficiencies in art, in concept, but you still need an art director with taste so it doesn't all look derivative. AI art all looks the same. Generic. You still need the art director, maybe fewer potential artists. I also think product managers, all the stuff that you guys are talking about, data analysts, which was my job when I rose within Zynga as a product manager, to try to figure out how to optimize each day to get best practices analyzing the data to see what increases engagement action. AI can do that, right? So I guess you wouldn't need me. White collar jobs, first ones to go.
You can listen to the full recording here.
Follow Beryl and Future of Work for further insights on YGG’s ongoing explorations of the growing AI landscape.
Follow Gregory, Jeff, Brett, and Baobab Studios for more information on how AI is reshaping creative industries across the world.
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