{"id":1799,"date":"2019-07-04T04:56:39","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T04:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kusuaks7\/?p=1404"},"modified":"2023-09-19T10:15:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T10:15:15","slug":"ai-in-five-fifty-and-five-hundred-years-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/ai-ml\/ai-in-five-fifty-and-five-hundred-years-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"AI in Five, Fifty and Five Hundred Years\u200a – \u200aPart One"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prediction is a tricky business.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have to step outside of your own limitations, your own beliefs, your own flawed and fragmented angle on the world and see it from a thousand different perspectives. You have to see giant abstract patterns and filter through human nature, politics, technology, social dynamics, trends, statistics, and probability.<\/p>\n

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We have to transcend the relativity of our own perspectives to see the\u00a0future.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so mind-numbingly complex that our tiny little simian brains stand very little chance of getting it right. Even predicting the future five or ten years out is amazingly complicated.<\/p>\n

So what am I going to do?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to try to predict 50 and 500 years from now!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, I realize this is utterly insane.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like climbing Mount Everest, with no shoes, no jacket, no Sherpa, and no oxygen after having barely climbed a small hill!<\/p>\n

Of course, I\u2019m going to do it anyway.<\/p>\n

When someone asked George Mallory why he climbed Mt Everest, he said \u201cbecause it was there.\u201d Like many famous quotes, he probably never really said it but who cares? The quote was so good we had to invent it anyway!<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s go for it!<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s dive in and take a look at how AI will change society in the next few years, and by the time you\u2019re old and grey, and when you\u2019re long since turned to dust.<\/p>\n

Where We Are\u00a0Now?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

AI is already radically changing the world. It\u2019s not coming. It\u2019s here.<\/p>\n

When you talk to your phone and it understands you want directions to Thai food, that\u2019s AI. AI is already\u00a0driving cars<\/a>, beating people at\u00a0ancient board games<\/a>\u00a0like Go, pummeling people in complex tournament\u00a0video games<\/a>\u00a0like DOTA 2, and\u00a0detecting diabetes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Machines hunts down\u00a0terrorist\u2019s money<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Pentagon just dropped its first comprehensive AI strategy<\/a>\u00a0while they build a\u00a0Joint Artificial Intelligence Center<\/a>\u00a0to automated war.<\/p>\n

Taylor Swift used facial recognition to track predators\u00a0at concerts<\/a>. She\u2019s not the only one. Facial recognition is\u00a0rolling out to airports everywhere<\/a>\u00a0all over the world and it\u2019s coming to a street corner near you.<\/p>\n

Hate it or love it, AI is everywhere.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s just getting started.<\/p>\n

Right now AI is a mustard seed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But from those seeds will grow a wild forest that ripples through every aspect of life from top to bottom.<\/p>\n

First Light in the Age of Intelligence<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the short term the promise and peril of AI is legion.<\/p>\n

AI will deliver some of our brightest fantasies and our darkest nightmares.<\/p>\n

Why both?<\/p>\n

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AI is a Universal Turing Machine\u00a0squared.<\/p>\n

Because AI is a universal technology. It\u2019s flexible enough to do whatever we want it to do.<\/p>\n

And that means it will reflect the good and evil of its creators:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For all the worry about Terminators and machines taking over, AI is not even close to sentient. It doesn\u2019t have its own desires. It\u2019s not taking over the world any time soon, although we\u2019ll explore that possibility when we gaze 500 years into the future.<\/p>\n

What we have now is narrow AI. It\u2019s limited to single tasks and it absolutely does whatever we tell it to do. It\u2019s under human control. If it does bad things we have only ourselves to blame.<\/p>\n

Where we\u2019re going in the next five to fifteen years is a future dominated by that narrow artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

AI and how it\u2019s used will reflect and magnify our nature a thousandfold, both the dark and the light.<\/p>\n

It will live in your cameras, your phone, your computer, your glasses and places public and private.<\/p>\n

It will power marketing, manufacturing, materials science and both preventative and palliative health care. It will level up surveillance and weapons technology. It will change the way we work, how we work with each other and how the world works.<\/p>\n

It will become our friend, our co-worker, and our enemy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Francois Chollet said, \u201c<\/strong>AI will become our interface to the world<\/strong><\/a>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, there will be nothing outside of the reach of AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Welcome to the dawn of the age of intelligence.<\/p>\n

Come with me now and I\u2019ll show you how it all begins and how it leads us into an intelligence explosion that will make the great shifts of humans past, hunter-gather to farming, farming to industrial revolution, and industrial revolution to the information age, look trivial by comparison.<\/p>\n

Health Care<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The most hopeful area of AI for good lays in the realm of health care.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Holmes might have fooled the world with\u00a0her grand fraud<\/a>, but she was right that we are at the beginning of a radical shift from reactive health care to preventative health care.<\/p>\n

(Even if she set it back a few years by scaring off investors.)<\/p>\n

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Detecting skin cancer<\/a>\u00a0with visual pattern recognition.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll point our\u00a0smart phones at a worrying spot on our arm<\/a>\u00a0and the AI that lives in our phone will tell us to call the doctor. When we send the report it generated to the doctor\u2019s office, the triage nurse will know to bump us to the head of the schedule if its skin cancer or a festering wound, rather than treating every patient as equal from hysterical hypochondriacs to the old lady who just likes talking to doctors.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0million dollar prize on Kaggle<\/a>in 2017 already produced some breakthroughs that are\u00a0having real world effects on detecting lung cancer<\/a>, a disease with a notorious false positive and false negative rate.<\/p>\n

False positives and negatives mean patients get the wrong care or get care too late or worse don\u2019t get care at all. Big improvements mean cheaper health care and people living a lot longer because they get the care they need when they need it.<\/p>\n

The biggest hurdle to AI in health care is the overly conservative and overly regulated nature of the system in almost every country in the world whether that\u2019s\u00a0the cold blooded big money system of the US<\/a>\u00a0or the sweeping socialized systems of Europe.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to get new devices approved. The barrier to entry is massive. Small boards of people we don\u2019t know act as a choke point, both protecting people from hucksters and slowing down innovation with their double edged sword.<\/p>\n

Expect those walls to start to come down as AI shows increasing promise.<\/p>\n

Laws will change to make it easier for AI based health devices to get into hospitals and into our phones and augmented reality glasses.<\/p>\n

As the walls come down it will open up the possibilities for preventative care at a more personal level. Your watch and your glasses will know that your frequent napping during the day isn\u2019t just overwork, it\u2019s sleep apnea.<\/p>\n

That will streamline the convoluted process we have now where you make an appointment to get a sleep study, then go to another appointment to get trained for the sleep study, then take the machine home and do the sleep study, then take it back to the office to get your results and then see a doctor in yet another appointment to prescribe the actual CPAP machine that alleviates the problem.<\/p>\n

Archaic and convoluted processes like this will start to fall to the power of AI.<\/p>\n

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And all around the hospital devices will get smarter, from blood pressure machines to cameras. Cameras will detect if old folks stop breathing, have a heart attack, or\u00a0take a nasty spill<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All of our devices will start to work as preventative care devices.<\/p>\n

Your watch<\/a>\u00a0will increasingly become your heart and health monitor. In ten to fifteen years it may even be able to predict a heart attack coming before you go face down in your eggs and bacon.<\/p>\n

\u201cALERT: Please go to an emergency room immediately as you\u2019re in danger of a heart attack.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That will mean you get to the hospital in time to live a lot longer.<\/p>\n

Despite\u00a0IBM Watson\u2019s recent failure in the health care market<\/a>, AI will work closely with doctors to study symptoms and diagnose disease. Even the best doctors can easily confuse the symptoms of something sinister with a bad cold or the flu. AI will draw from a broader baseline of knowledge and it will spot rare diseases quicker than any human mind. It will make doctor\u2019s intuition all the more refined because it will take the load of deep pattern matching off their plate.<\/p>\n

And of course, humans can\u2019t fix spiraling and\u00a0<\/strong>out of control healthcare costs<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe the machines can?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Centaur\u00a0Army<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The next best case for AI in the coming years is as co-worker not as a replacement for us. Whether its blue collar tasks or white collar tasks, AI will change the way everyone does business.<\/p>\n

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AIs that works side by side with humans to make us better, smarter and faster already have a nickname:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Centaurs<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They\u2019re named after\u00a0Gary Kasparov\u2019s early experiments with chess tournaments<\/a>, where an AI and human teams bested pure AI and unaugmented humans. The tournament\u2019s name came from the mythical beast of Greek legend that\u2019s half horse and half man, symbolizing how man and machine can work together.<\/p>\n

Centaurs are already hard at work and creeping into my devices.<\/p>\n

My Gmail\u00a0suggests ways to complete sentences<\/a>\u00a0and it works surprisingly smoothly. It\u2019s not always right but it often saves me time during the day by doing the grunt work of business email, finishing sentences like \u201cIt was nice to meet you the other day\u201d or \u201clet\u2019s find a time that works for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

We tend to think of AI as C3P0, a mimic of human intelligence but that\u2019s not what we have now. We have specialized intelligence not generalized intelligence.<\/p>\n

In other words it can\u2019t do all the work for us.<\/p>\n

Yet.<\/p>\n

(Again we\u2019ll explore if that changes in the article looking 500 years out.)<\/p>\n

Because it\u2019s not generalized, AI will get deployed alongside humans to help them do their work much better.<\/p>\n

Take a call center. Everyone\u2019s had a terrible experience calling customer service. It\u2019s often a low paying job with a high turn over rate. If you\u2019re lucky enough to find someone who can think clearly and actually solve your problem on the other end of the line, it\u2019s pretty much guaranteed that person will get promoted to manager or move on to another job more suited to their skills before you ever reach them again.<\/p>\n

But what if we could model the best and smartest people in\u00a0a call center and turn that wisdom into a digital dashboard?<\/p>\n

Now we have an average customer service rep working closely with an AI that suggests stronger solutions to a problem, taking some of the critical thinking off their plate. That raises the intelligence of the entire team. They won\u2019t reach the sublime level of that rare customer service rep who dances through red tape and convoluted back office systems with ease, but it will make the average customer rep a lot better.<\/p>\n

In factories, we\u2019ll see more and more AIs in charge of safety, monitoring equipment and predicting breakdowns long before engineers have finished arguing about who\u2019s wrong. That will mean less accidents and better productivity.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll also see centaur systems helping us with city infrastructures. Drones and satellites will\u00a0monitor crops for the spread of disease<\/a>\u00a0and soar over city streets\u00a0hunting for pot holes<\/a>\u00a0and filling them in. That knowledge will better inform public policy. Right now, which roads get fixed has absolutely nothing to do with where the money is needed most. It\u2019s usually the result of politicians horse trading or outright guessing.<\/p>\n

Armed with knowledge, the general public can demand better roads and bridges because they\u2019ll actually know which ones are broken and engineers will know what roads to schedule for repaving next.<\/p>\n

Centaurs will be everywhere in the next five years to fifteen years, spreading slowly and then quickly.<\/p>\n

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Meet Lily.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ll live in our phones and in our ears. They\u2019re already\u00a0correcting your crappy photography<\/a>, changing lighting and steadying pictures. Tomorrow they\u2019ll help you\u00a0learn a language faster<\/a>, with devices like Lily, the happy little language AI, that talks to you conversationally and understands you didn\u2019t get that tone right when you tried to pick up Mandarin for that trip to see the Great Wall in China.<\/p>\n

The earbuds in your favorite wireless headphones will\u00a0double as a rapid translator<\/a>\u00a0when you touch down in Korea and realize no cab drivers speak a freaking word of your native language. Your phone will translate your words back to the cab driver and in no time you\u2019ll be on your way in an extraordinarily overpriced ride from the airport!<\/p>\n

Digital Darwinism and the Origin of\u00a0Species<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Of course, every light has a shadow.<\/p>\n

And nothing will make that shadow more clear than the dawn of an\u00a0<\/strong>AI arms race<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The next five to fifteen years will mark the beginning of a new digital Darwinism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s survival of the fittest at the military and economic level, the nation state level and the business level.<\/p>\n

I recently watched the European Unions\u2019\u00a0AI Night<\/a>\u00a0in Paris and all the talk was on \u201ccollaborating\u201d and \u201cworking together\u201d and \u201cprivacy\u201d and \u201chuman rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a noble effort to make AI \u201chuman centric.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, in the short term, it just won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

A human centric approach puts the EU at a massive disadvantage in these early days of AI\u2019s rapid evolution versus countries that don\u2019t give a shit about privacy and human rights.<\/p>\n

Like China.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s narrow AI feeds on big data. The more data you can collect the smarter your AI gets, at least until\u00a0it hits a point of diminishing returns<\/a>\u00a0after its chewed through petabytes of imagery and text and video.<\/p>\n

If your citizens don\u2019t have any right to privacy and the government can do whatever it wants, it makes it super easy to build massive data sets to train your AI.<\/p>\n

That gives China a tremendous early advantage.<\/p>\n

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Alibaba City Brain Dashboard.<\/p>\n

While the EU is still debating AI ethics, holding hands and singing songs, China is already rolling out AI at a breathtaking pace. In Hangzhou, the government-backed, Alibaba-built \u201cCity Brain<\/a>\u201d monitors 50,000 cameras, directs traffic, detects car crashes\u00a0in under 20 seconds<\/a>\u00a0and tracks criminals.<\/p>\n

They won\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n

They want to build city scale visual search engines, call fire trucks before the people even know their house is burning and they most assuredly have stealth purposes not listed in their marketing material, like tracking dissidents and general malcontents.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the biggest problem with AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only universal, it\u2019s dual use.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we use it to track old people in hospitals when they go into cardiac arrest or stop breathing, it\u2019s only a short hop to monitoring old folks for health insurance to penalize them for not working out enough or taking their medicine.<\/p>\n

For governments the ethics implications are even worse. Every country will want to deploy AI at the City Brain scale but they\u2019ll need to tread a fine line between privacy and the public good.<\/p>\n

That line is fuzzy at best.<\/p>\n

The road to Hell is paved with the motto \u201cfor the greater good.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

For every use case I can think of that\u2019s a clear public win, I can think of two that hold a more sinister edge.<\/p>\n

Yet, there are clear and obvious greater goods:<\/p>\n