AI — Are humans going to subdue or surrender to this new phenomenon?

What was the most 'innovative' jargon that was widely used in the last 10 years? Innovation. There are more books on innovation than actual innovations. The world is now getting ready for the next big jargon. It is none other than Artificial Intelligence, simply AI. There is widespread fear that AI could take over human lives completely. I was typing an email in gmail yesterday where I wanted to attach a document but forgot it. When I tried to send the mail, gmail asked 'do you have a document to attach?' because it figured out from my email 'Please find attached...' and checking in with me. It was like 'wow'. But it is also scary that somebody is watching you all the time.

Intelligence is about processing the world around us and making decisions. Every living being has intelligence. Be it the tortoise that decides to go inside its shell or an octopus that changes color or a child crying to attract the attention of the mother or an adult deciding to go under a shelter when it is raining, intelligence is all about making decisions to survive effectively.

Humans have been very effective in leveraging the intelligence of other species - using a horse to move faster, using bulls to plough the fields or using elephants to move big logs of wood. Then, humans started thinking how to store intelligence and use it to save time & energy. Let’s say, I want to calculate what is 118 x 236. I can manually calculate on paper and it will take 3 minutes. If I am running a shop, where I have to calculate such numbers every 5 mins, then it is a serious waste of time. What did human beings do? They created a form factor called calculator with buttons and programmed simple ‘mathematics’ algorithms into it. The ‘Calculator’ is a machine with intelligence artificially built into it. It cannot input the numbers. It doesn’t know what problems to solve. But it is intelligent enough to solve any addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. So a human can use the intelligence stored in a machine to amplify their intelligence.

A human can use a machine to enhance the speed of their decisions. A human can give the inputs. The machine will process the inputs and give an output which then can be used by humans. I put clothes inside a washing machine. The machine washes it. I will then use the washed clothes. Similarly, we have created numerous machines as simple as calculator to slightly complex machines like TV, Washing Machine, Fridge, Air Conditioning, Telephone, Microwave etc that are loaded with specific knowledge to solve specific problems around cooling, washing, heating, calculating etc.

None of these machines had ‘insights’ or the ability to process data to form meaningful conclusions which could then drive their decisions. After the advent of the internet, things started to change little bit. Machines and other devices could be made to look intelligent. If you have an outlook, you can create a signature that will send an automatic reply when you are out of office or when you are on holidays. If you are busy at work, you can leave a voice message on your phone. The human computer interaction (HCI) was getting better and better. It was applied in Aeroplanes where the pilot doesn't have to drive the plane but rather the machine programs its path and humans intervened where it is required. The HCI was getting seamless. We could see that in ATM machines where an interface will greet you or an Amazon website which will make recommendations based on your previous purchase history. But even at this stage, the machine had no insights. It doesn’t have a theory or in simple words, it cannot explain ‘why’ to itself or others.

However, a recent NYTimes article ‘One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine’ highlights a huge breakthrough where a machine seems to demonstrate insights. In early December, researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google’s parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from the frontiers of chess.A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine-learning algorithm that had mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen.

The world of invention and science is all about discovering patterns that have universal appeal or universal truth to put it in extreme words. We all know that deep patterns exist. Humans discovered these patterns to harness electricity, telecommunication signals so on and so forth. Humans have a certain kind of intelligence to help their survival and similarly, every species has developed intelligence that helps their survival. The real possibility is that these machines could harness patterns either riding on the intelligence of different species like how humans did or transcend all these intelligence and generate deep patterns that are available through the permutation and combinations of billions and zillions of particles at the sub atomic level.

Computers were ONLY available to scientists at IBM or at Xerox just a few decades ago. Today, computers have almost reached their saturation point in the human usage and may become extinct in the face of mobile and touch screens. Today’s laptop computer is equivalent or more powerful than many supercomputers of the 70s and 80s. What was PhD level data analysis could be available to teenagers to solve some of their simple day to day problems — restaurant listings or dating girls. What was a historian’s work in a lifetime could be a matter of a day or a month. What a Phd student did in 5–7 years, could be solved in 7 hours. Cancer and other complex diseases could be cured if the algorithms can detect deep patterns and change those growth patterns of the malignant cells.

The next era is like using a rocket to go from Zurich to Geneva or from Chennai to Bangalore. Hyper-speed will be the name of the game. While data will be the new currency that will enrich your material life, time is the currency that will enrich your spiritual life. There will be few skills that will ensure that a human can lead a peaceful and cheerful life that on average will be the longest in the history of humans.

1. A human’s ability to slow down and create time for herself will be the most precious skill. When everything is going so fast and so deep, we need to take deep restful breaks on a daily basis. Humans may have to sleep and rest longer.
2. A human’s ability to become aware and to control the ego. Machines may overtake our intelligence. A strategy consultant of tomorrow may be the equivalent of a call-center executive of today.
3. A human's ability to synthesize, connect the dots and imagine is going to the key. They need to constantly move above the vantage point of the machine as the machine's intelligence evolves from a pet level to a child level to a teen level to an adult level.
4. Most importantly, a human's ability to observe without evaluating is going to be very critical. It is only when we free ourselves from the constant judgements, we can create algorithms that can start to observe and study patterns without judgement.

Most recently, we all read an essay written by an Open AI. Researchers asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. I read the essay and found it to be highly reflective. They are getting there and we need to get ourselves to be ready.

How we slow ourselves down, how we become self aware to control our ego, how we imagine and how we observe without evaluation will become the cornerstone of a healthy, progressive and cheerful life in this new world of Artificial Intelligence.