What happens when the Internet of Things becomes AI?

When Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk all agree on something, it’s worth paying attention.
All three have warned of the potential dangers that artificial intelligence or AI can bring. The world’s foremost physicist, Hawking said that the full development of artificial intelligence could “spell the end of the human race”. Musk, the tech entrepreneur who brought us PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX described artificial intelligence as our “biggest existential threat” and said that playing around with AI was like “summoning the demon”. Gates, who knows a thing or two about tech, puts himself in the “concerned” camp when it comes to machines becoming too intelligent for us humans to control.
What are these wise souls afraid of? AI is broadly described as the ability of computer systems to ape or mimic human intelligent behavior. This could be anything from recognizing speech, to visual perception, making decisions and translating languages. Examples run from Deep Blue who beat chess champion Garry Kasparov to supercomputer IBM Watson who outguessed the world’s best Jeopardy player. 
An important component of AI, and a key element in the fears it engenders, is the ability of machines to take action on their own without human intervention. This could take the form of a computer reprogramming itself in the face of an obstacle or restriction. 
Needless to say, there are those in the tech world who have a more sanguine view of AI and what it could bring. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, does not see the future inhabited by HAL’s – the homicidal computer on board the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kelly sees a more prosaic world that looks more like Amazon Web Services: a cheap, smart, utility which is also exceedingly boring simply because it will run in the background of our lives. He says AI will enliven inert objects in the way that electricity did over 100 years ago. 
Running parallel to the extraordinary advances in the field of AI is the even bigger development of what is loosely called, the Internet of Things (IoT). This can be broadly described as the emergence of countless objects, animals and even people with uniquely identifiable, embedded devices that are wirelessly connected to the Internet. These ‘nodes’ can send or receive information without the need for human intervention. There are estimates that there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020. Current examples of these smart devices include Nest thermostats, WiFi-enabled washing machines and the increasingly connected cars with their built-in sensors that can avoid accidents and even park for you.
So what happens when these millions of embedded devices connect to artificially intelligent machines? What does AI + IoT = ? 
The answer may lie in some new thinking about consciousness. As a concept, as well as an experience, consciousness has proved remarkably hard to pin down. We all know that we have it (or at least we think we do), but scientists are unable to prove that we have it or, indeed, exactly what it is and how it arises. Dictionaries describe consciousness as the state of being awake and aware of our own existence. It is an “internal knowledge” characterized by sensation, emotions and thought. 
Back in the mid-1990s, the author Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an influential piece for Wired, A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain. In it she described the work of a little known Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, who 50 years earlier described a global sphere of thought, the “living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts, experiences and consciousness.
Teilhard called it the “noosphere” (noo is Greek for mind). He saw it as the evolutionary step beyond our geosphere (physical world) and biosphere (biological world). The informational wiring of a being, whether it is made up of neurons or electronics, gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increase, de Chardin argued, evolution is led towards greater consciousness. Or as John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, cyber advocate and Teilhard de Chardin fan said: “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness.”
So, perhaps we shouldn’t be so alarmed. Maybe we are on the cusp of a breakthrough not just in the field of artificial intelligence and the emerging Internet of things, but also in our understanding of consciousness itself. If we can resolve the privacy, security and trust issues that both AI and the IoT present, we might make an evolutionary leap of historic proportions. And it is just possible Teilhard’s remarkable vision of an interconnected “thinking layer” is what the web has been all along.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/internet-of-things-artificially-intelligent-stephen-hawking-spike-jonze?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2