The Future of Artificial Intelligence
If you have seen the 2017 movie Salvation, you would probably be as impressed as I was with the extraordinary ability of the brilliant Darius Tanz who was trying to save humanity from the impending asteroid collision of the day. But more impressive was the superpower capabilities he had, not the kind of movie stars in Avengers Endgame however, but a kind that was imposed by his Personal Assistant AI robot, Tess! That was representative of a lot currently going on in reality — robots are making us superheroes, from managing and forecasting sales in a way that could probably only been pulled off by prophets of the order of Nostradamus, to quickly completing tasks infamous for how they feed on time. They have become an invaluable component of our existence — probably inevitable too.
As most of us already know, technology is grossly affecting our daily lives, impacting virtually everything we do.
In fact, there would soon be only a handful of things not affected by technologies. And AI has been the chief of them. The field has grown since the 80s into the current time, a growth accelerated faster towards the tail of the years than the head. Looking retrospectively, we may gain sufficient insights about the future of this technology. After all, that is what is at the heart of AI, or more accurately Machine Learning.
Although, as with anything associated with intelligence, it is hard to tell how they will evolve, but the future of AI is one that is highly interwoven with the lives of human beings. We intend to scratch the near future of the technology, a little beyond the recent self-driving cars and its impact in businesses. Shall we take a peek?
Some fields that are and would keep experiencing the radical invasion of AI include:
· Transportation
Today is the era of self-driving cars. The tech pioneer Elon Musk has promised a fleet of full self-driving Tesla vehicles by next year, BMW and Mercedes have launched theirs, and Uber testing out their lidar-equipped AI-equipped automobiles. I guess you already know where I am going with this. It may sound freaky-creepy-exciting to some people, but it is a step for mankind as a whole, and a leap for machines into another vital part of our lives.
Just recently, the International Institute for Sustainable Development produced a report stating that the testing of fully autonomous long-distance trains is already underway. Also, a 2015-founded Chinese startup TuSimple , successfully completed a 200-mile test drive for a driverless truck passed from Yuma, Arizona, to San Diego, California. The startup used 10s of millions of miles of simulated driving was used to train the dense neural network behind the vehicle. There seem to be no relenting; autonomous bikes and cars are future “inevitables”.
We would not have to worry about parking spaces as it would be cheaper for your car to just drive back home, and the pharmaceutical companies could cut down cost by using delivery EVs as opposed to setting up retail outlets. These vehicles would be available to the market by 2020.
· Health
This area is undergoing serious transformation, with AI systems now involved in diagnostics, medical recommendation, and emergency services. And in this regard, the IBM Watson system is a pioneer. The system leverages both Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing modules, and has made promising progress in oncology. For example, in a cancer research, 99% of the treatment recommendations from Watson are coherent with the physician decisions!
We also have Google DeepMind Health studying patient data to make diagnostics, and Atomwise — a deep learning app that help companies make breakthroughs in rolling out new drugs, as well as Ginger.io an app which looks at a patient’s history and then leverages cutting-edge data-driven solutions to proffer mental health improving recommendations.
Although there are a number of drawbacks in this area, as there are strict regulations and challenges associated with data exchange in this sector. Indeed everyone is entitled to keeping their medical records private; so exchanging data between medical institutions has been a challenge. AI will solve this problem in the future, and give you that privacy you deserve.
Thanks to the recent innovations — Federated Learning — the marriage of AI with Blockchain, that allows for models to be trained with preservation of privacy; we hope that would help in the future to solve the data exchange issue.
· Cybernetics
This part is one area that is very dear to my heart. I have a goal to figure out how the Universe works, and will likely do that both with my mind and a machine’s. Cyborgs are no longer a science fiction thing.
Thing of it for a moment, that you could implant a chip in your nervous track that connects you to the tons of information on the internet, that brain cells can be cultured in the laboratory, that biological brains can be embedded in machines and artificially developed brains can be connected to biological systems — BCIs. It’s a lot to imagine, I know, but that is the future. It will be commonplace to blink your eye and scroll through your textbooks under your eyelid. Ok, I guess I would leave it here before you start finding this funny. But keep in mind that personal assistant robots are becoming more popular than ever, and there are already concrete developments of facial recognition systems, biometric AI, and machines that provide empathetic responses. Where do you think that is going?
· Entertainment
From Netflix using AI for movie recommendation, to sites like Spotify and Pandora that use AI to help you create stations that exclusively play your favorite music, entertainment is far from being immune to the invasion. But these are just the tip of the iceberg of the extent to which AI will cater to our entertainment interests. In the future, AI applications may analyze our interests and draw upon them to create music and shows that use digital performers! Now given that everything will be based on personal preferences, you’ll rarely have to sit through a song you don’t like. If you are like me, you probably have popped a bottle of beer to that.
As earlier stated, it is difficult to tell where the journey goes with AI, but we can forecast, only forecast; well, also create. But while the technology is forming a big pat of our lives, we must keep some other considerations in mind.
Other Considerations
Some say the singularity of Artificial Intelligence is near; that point where artificial circuits starts to replicate themselves at molecular level, uniting with biological neurons, forming a network of extreme intelligence and with extraordinary powers like telepathy. It sounds like doomsday if such Intelligence decides to mete havoc upon humanity, right? At least that’s how it sounds to me. But it also sounds unrealistic to me too, at least not anytime soon. There are however considerations to make machines more intelligent and less artificial, just in case.
There are also ethical considerations to the technology. As UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Director-General Audrey Azoulay opened this year’s global Conference, she said,
“The issues raised by artificial intelligence are not technological. They concern our own humanity, raising scientific, political, philosophical and ethical questions.”
When AlphaGo beat Go player of 9 dan rank Ke Jie 3 times, he made the following remark:
“It’s perfect, it’s just flawless, merciless. I don’t think I could catch up with it in my lifetime”.
And with recent advances in the field prospectively looking at intruding into people’s thoughts, there is a strong call for ethical considerations.
It is still a question whether machines would eventually develop human-like minds. Well in philosophy, the story has it that Rene Descartes while in a bar made the remark, “I think, therefore I am”. These machines now think, technically. So its either they are a consciousness of their own, or Descartes was probably drunk.
I would not make a comment on this, but retain my position and stay open to the possibilities — there are indeed limitless possibilities, and so is it with the future of AI.
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