Elon Musk is right: Here are some predictions I made about Artificial Intelligence in 2015

Recently there’s been a lot in the news about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg waging a war of words over the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). My view is that Mark is right about the fact that we need to focus on the positives of AI, but Elon is also right because it’s even more important to not underrate the negatives.
In 2015, Dr. Fei Fei Li gave a Ted talk, on how she chose to look more at the quality of data in building an AI system, other than a better algorithm. She eventually embarked on an ambitious project to map out the entire world of objects and use the resulting data to train a “Convolutional Neural Network” (a kind of machine learning configuration). The results have been amazing. In just seven years, the system’s accuracy in classifying objects in the dataset rose from 71.8% to 97.3%, surpassing human abilities and effectively proving that bigger data leads to better decisions. You should watch it.
These results have gotten everyone excited. It showed that we can use the technology for many good things; first we teach it to see, and then it helps us see better. Today, these convolutional neural networks are everywhere. Facebook uses them to tag our photos; self-driving cars are using them to detect objects; basically anything that knows what’s in an image or video uses them. They can tell what’s in an image by finding patterns between pixels on ascending levels of abstraction, using thousands to millions of tiny computations on each level.
But it’s not only Dr. Fei Fei that is training these systems, many other people are, and not for goals as noble as hers. Also, it’s becoming increasingly easy to train these systems or networks to learn. Google is democratizing AI like no other company in the world. It has released products such as TensorFlow: An open-source software library for Machine Intelligence, making it easier for everyday people to build their own models, Cloud Machine learning engine: a managed service that enables you to easily build machine learning models that work on any type of data, of any size and API’s that make it seamless to inject AI into your business.
In summary, it’s getting really easy to build technology that can impact the world very positively, or negatively, and anyone can build it. And this is where I agree with Elon Musk; It’s great to be excited about the progress, but that doesn’t mean we should discount the negatives, especially when we humans could do a lot of wrong with it. It’s important we embrace it, and equally important, is that we should not underrate its potential to make the world a worse place.
In 2015, I made some bad predictions about a future of AI. In another post, I will share what we can do to prevent it. Here are my predictions on AI (some of which have started happening already).
The predictions
- The next industrial revolution is the rise of AI.
- The more valuable AI will be the ones that have learnt the most.
- Robots will do our basic chores; agriculture, transportation, security, etc.
- There will be only one type of job; AI innovation/maintenance. Robots will do virtually everything.
- We will exist in a society where energy and matter transformation will be seamless. That means food will be free, clothing free.
- Whoever controls the AI controls everything else.
- We will have big government directly or indirectly.
- The gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’, will be the highest in human history. The pyramid of wealth will be greatly distorted.
- Among the gods will be descendants of Larry Page, Kalanick Travis etc.
- Africa will be at the very very bottom of the distorted pyramid. She will have virtually nothing to export.
- Her (Africa) natural resources will be near worthless compared to the technology she will need to import.
- She will attempt to build her technology; her AI and robots, but like Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo’s Project Index, she will be too late because AI is about LEARNING.
- The survival of mankind in those days will heavily depend on the quality of character of the ‘gods’.
- Global competitiveness of the future will measured by which country’s AI is the most learnt.
Some of it is happening already
Being afraid has it positives, it’s helps us constantly think of ways to keep AI something that makes the world better.
