What is the Next Evolution of Humanity?
Maybe there is a silver lining after all.
Oleksander Bondarev (Alex for short) is a Co-Founder at SentiSum, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help enterprises better understand their customer opinion.
Alex is often found explaining confusing concepts on whiteboards and closely follows the progress in this industry, thus, starting a company using the base of natural language processing to better understand what the future of the field looks like.
B: Thanks for taking the time out today Alex. Our focus for MMXL is future technology and the impact on society it will have. What do you think the future will look like?
Bleak than wonderful. We’re going to have a new definition of what it means to be human.
Through technology we will redefine the meaning of humanity. As of now humanity does not hold too much good in it.
Historically humans have been far from humane to each other. We will struggle, then we will get much better. Humans of today are vastly different to humans of 100 years ago, and that trend is not going to change. We are at the edge of our transcendence, if not in our lifetime :( most certainly in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.
B: Redefining Humanity? How so?
We’re going to have a deep look at what it means to be conscious and alive. Fundamentally we will change what it means to be human on a biological level.
Homosapiens had little say in thier evolution, until now. We are going to be ever more in control. Our children’s children will definitely be genetically engineered.
It is our responsibility for parents to prepare children for future. It is unfair to play dice with your child’s health, now we can control that (before birth).
B: So we’re going to genetically engineer our children?
The people who have the power and money will have access to this technology. John Legend chose the sex of his child, he chose a girl. This is just the beginning.
You now have companies like 23 and Me it allows you to sequence your DNA.
Why is that important? This is the first step of understanding your building blocks. The first step is to sequence your genome. We will be able to understand what genes cause issues within our species.
Technology is enabling us to do amazing things. Take Crispr cas9— it’s the technique of editing DNA sequences in live beings. This comes from viruses and their replication — it can cut DNA from your cells and replace that with another strip of DNA in a live cell. Gene editing on the fly in our own bodies, the future is amazing. This gives us the ethical question. Should we be doing this?
B: What has your vision caused you to work on?
Currently at SentiSum, we help enterprises make sense of all their opinionated data. I fundamentally believe we’re building <rant>Something Awesome</rant>.
Today we have a lot of weak AI applications limited to certain domains. What’s missing is something tying these systems together. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is what we do. NLU comes after natural language processing. Our system can ingest complex text written by a human, and break it down into singular units of opinions relating to a particular feature of your service or product.
Technology like ours will become the building blocks of next generation AI applications that blend narrow AI API’s to make something greater than the some of the individual parts.
B: Why?
We are building the future. I think services such as NLP, Computer Vision, Signal Processing API’s will be a commodity. These will be the building blocks of more complicated and hopefully more useful systems. Pushing the frontier of insight that is available to enterprises today, is what gets my attention for the 9–5.
BF: What are your main influences for your work?
Elon Musk, Hugh Herr, Ray Kurzweil, and Geoffrey Hinton for his pure determination for pushing his ideas for Neural Networks.
Musk for obvious reasons. Kurzweil for transcendence and pushing the younger generation. Herr for pushing the frontier in what it means to be human. For facilitating the disabled of today to be super-enabled tomorrow.
B: After it’s all done, no matter whats the outcome, what do you want to dedicate yourself to?
So, what I want to be written on my gravestone?
Your gravestone is the ending to your life, so once you define how you want it to end, all you have to do is just make a plan to get there.
I want people to be curious. There is a ton of pressure to be a “master” of a specific trait, specialisation has worked great up until now. Our civilisation has greatly benefited from division of labour. However as we head into the future, creativity is going to play a HUGE part of our society. The way to do this? Learn about multiple functional areas. Be a broad generalist. Never stop learning. Always learn to the problem, and not for the sake of knowing.
Knowledge gives you the color to paint a vivid representation of the world.
The better your representation of the world, the more adapt you will be to your environment. Sleight of Mouth was the first piece of literature that introduced me to this sort of thinking. A wonderful book about the magic of conversational belief change.
We all have different maps of our environment. All of us have a different perception of now. The clearer we get with our communication channels the more progress we will reap. And I fundamentally believe that this progress will come from technological enhancements.
My map of the world looks like this. It’s a mental palace. I try to identify and hold common abstractions between different domains. Understanding patterns in various domains is a super power tool to have at your disposal. Whatever happens I will continue to push forward to make connections and create the future as I see fit.
Here lies the man who fully embraced his own curiosity.
Oleksander Bondarev is the co-founder of SentiSum a 500 Startups backed company and spends his time reading, coding, and creating AI art (see left)
If you are in the Bay Area with a curiosity in AI click here to see Alex speak and hear more about AI & Ethics on Tuesday February 28th @ the Product Den in SF.
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