Artificial Intelligence - Hope Or Illusion?
Are we entering an age where machines will take over from humans, for the better or worse?
The race has begun, as scientists start to unravel a mystery that men like Alan Turing spoke about in the 20th century, where machines will be more intelligent than humans, improving by themselves over time.
Dozens of movies tried to depict Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its full version like, Johnny Depp’s Transcendence, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Will Smith’s I, Robot. However, movies always show the negative side of it.
As many inventions in history came through military necessity; during World War 2, it was the early days of AI when Alan Turing was brought in to break the secret codes of Nazi communication through the Enigma machine. Advancement from there resulted in Turing Test named after the gentleman, which is instrumental within the AI field.
Artificial Intelligence involves case based, commonsense and automated reasoning, high level computer vision, heuristic search and machine learning among others.
The notion of AI is not necessary for computers to be like humans, but the truth is that they ought to be better than humans, and solve problems in short time; this technology is to escalate the invention, innovation and improvement of the world as we know it in healthcare, science, technology, learning and commerce etc.
Some of human inventions were born out of inspiration, free will, frustration, lack and fear; then the question become that these new age machines, can they create things out of the above. We like saying necessity is the mother of invention, but when a machine does not have a sense of necessity, what will drive new inventions?
As complex as this might seem, through their cognitive computing power, the ability to develop themselves, they will come up with super ground breaking stuff we did not even think of, due to the ability to organize information within seconds, minutes and hours depending on what it wants to create.
One of the most advanced AI, is IBM Watson which is totally on another level of intelligence, capable of making decisions by using the process of observe, interpret, evaluate and decide.
Elon Musk considers AI the single human threat, even though he is invested in Vicarious along high profile investors like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, to keep an eye on AI.
Another threat is on Robotic Intelligence, where robots will be acting like us, thousand times more intelligent than humans; the moment we lose control over them, and gaining free will, then what could happen might surprise us too. But this can be regulated in their engineering.
The psychological implications that AI will have on us, will be when smartphones will be perceived as people, making smartphones friends, as current AI applications can learn patterns of your life, how you react, talk, behave and experiences, then it will treat you in that manner. It will add to the smartphone syndrome, as people are already attached to their phones, checking them more than 150 times per day.
AI is not a new concept, it has been in existence, evidenced in computer games, where your computer opponent will decide a Chess next move within a second, after calculating all probabilities to win in split seconds.
In the near future, there will be two types of companies, those that use artificial intelligence, and those that don’t; as always, those that move with the times, are habitually more prosperous.
We should be aware that AI will definitely fuel mass unemployment.
In the last decade to the current one, AI applications are in the process of connecting technology with society, adding the human element to this invention.
There is a growing list of personal assistance AI applications by the big three, namely, Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft Cortana; then we see not so big companies like Couple.me’s Alice and Cognitive Code’s SILVIA in the mist of others, however this space is not yet populated like your usual apps. Diffbot is also changing the game, going for the same market Google aims for.
This kind of AI applications, will fade out many apps, making them irrelevant, ultimately people will have few apps, plus AI application that does most of the functions mobile apps use to do. This will also be a major driver in the emergence of Internet of Things; fridges, cars, home appliances will be underpinned by Artificial Intelligence.
Companies with a foresight of the future need to start moving now, to avoid the Kodak type of a situation. There were periodic times when companies needed to have a website, then accounting software, now apps, and soon to be AI.
This is it, this is the next big thing in technological evolution. The future is here, better adapt now, or end up in history books!
