Power to the People… thru Deep Learning!!!

or at least that’s what we are idealistically desiring…

On Friday, February 5th, 2016 I attended a Holberton School sponsored Meetup addressing the Theory of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. It was my first exposure to this topic in a formal setting. The joint presentation by Gregory Renard and Louis Monier was both thorough and thought provoking.

We were first given a historical overview. This, more than anything, let me know that the rate at which this field is accelerating is far more unfathomable than I could have ever imagined. I am grateful that I have at least half a chance at not going completely insane with shock, as I read and watched plenty of Science Fiction growing up. Please note that I said “half a chance.”

After listening to these two speak about the Big Data and Neural Networks, I am not sure that I, nor anyone else, is adequately prepared for what is about to happen to our world. We are certainly no longer immune to the possibility of losing our sense of humanity as the lines between biology and technology blur. At some point much sooner than most people will be comfortable, we will need to find a way to completely redefine what it means to be human.

We are currently utilizing Machine Learning to look at and interpret massive amounts of digital information. The output has the capacity to present us with elegant solutions to enormous problems that currently plague our world. These problems are so complex, they exceed our ability to adequately define, let alone comprehend.

Gregory Renard and Louis Monier exposed the Holberton School students and the Meetup attendees, to a Neural Network based on the Javascript implementation of Neural networks by Andrej Karpathy: “ConvNetJS.” It is a browser based library for training Deep Learning models with Neural Networks and I would encourage you to take a peek!

As with any new technology, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, all have a potential dark side. Sensors, cameras, microphones and other data collecting devices have become more prolific (and economical) leading one to wonder, who will wield the biggest data sets and what will they do with that information?

We had a question and answer session around the many ethical implications that this technology presents. These discussions caused me to later, poke around the net and ponder Apple’s recent acquisition of Emotient, Inc’s technology which recognizes facial expressions. The ramifications of our lives becoming more transparent have grave repercussions if not handled appropriately such as the recent Vtek hack which exposed the data of 6.4 million children and the Hello Barbie Hack which could potentially compromise the most intimate thoughts of children at play.

When headlines tout that our IoT Devices are possible witnesses in custody battles is it too late to consider what we can do?

At the end of our Meetup, I was left with more questions than answers and was grateful for having had the opportunity to learn. No one knows how this technology is going to change the world but I believe that most can agree that indeed it will… because it’s coming to a theatre near you, faster than you can jump in your new driverless car!