Aye Aye AI - Golden Age of Innovation in Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science – How will this impact Humans?

“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” - Ray Kurzweil

“There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” - Gray Scott

Artificial Intelligence has been around for quite some time. However, last 10 years have really propelled AI to an exponential growth level. This poses a lot of questions. Can AI really help computing to a machine driven by AI world that 

• Replace humans who can be curious uses gut fee
• Have the ability to think structured or unstructured and communicate well
• Ability to link the dots, think iteratively and abstract in simple terms and make superior decisions?
• Have tenacity and stamina to deliver what the end-customer wants as an outcome
• Improve continuously via self-improvement measures
• Possess ability to perform solidly in a team as a team player
• Possess ability to collaborate
• Have empathy and use emotional intelligence
• Use judgment in an ethically wise manner
• j) Have a point of differences that eventuates in a better world experience with a futuristic thought process?

“ The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?” - Gray Scott

Let’s rewind the clock a bit and start with three historical snippets (very much available in Wikipedia and public Internet for verification).

• In 1927, Fritz Lang directs a movie, Metropolis that focuses on the futuristic year of 2026. This movie had some foresight into things that would eventuate in a century. In the city of Metropolis, rich entrepreneurs rule from skyscrapers, whereas blue-collar laborers laboriously operate the machines in the underground that power the city. This is similar to the famous scene showcased in the movie “Titanic” as well. What Fritz Lang highlighted is a classical digital divide of those who have made it and those who didn’t with marginalized and people with lesser skills toiling to make a living. Not much of a difference in many emerging and developed markets.
• In 1936, a 23-year-old genius invents the machine, named A-Machine that lays the foundation to modern day computer science and Artificial Intelligence.
• In 1942, Isaac Asimov comes up with the Three Laws of Robotics in his seminal work I Robot. "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D." quotes,

1.A robot may not injure a human being or, 
through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2.A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings 
except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as 
such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

A lot of progress has been made since these thought-provoking, futuristic ideas, visualizations and stories by three storied personalities in various spheres. A lot of brilliant movies have been made and brilliant fiction was written. We have plenty of examples in movies and in fiction about how machines can societies with AI, have crimes unleashed with Outlawed AI, Being a Menace to society, Be noble servitude to society, mingle AI with Humanity, Thrive for equality sans marginalization, Have sentient feelings with human-level intelligence as a pinnacle of human creation with a need for self-actualization seeking an understanding and purpose, seeking human acceptance and overcoming ethical struggles by doing the right thing at the right time and play a part in futuristic evolution. This could be the age of singularity and it wouldn’t be a surprise if such a situation emerges in the same year as mentioned in Asimov’s I Robot handbook – in 2058.

If you want a good read on humans behind AI – This article is a good one to read.

“A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AI's will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.” - Ray Kurzweil

Some science fiction stories, instead of depicting a future with artificially conscious beings, portray advanced technologies based on current day AI research, called non-sentient or weak AI. These include speech, gesture and natural language understanding, control and information retrieval conversational systems, and real-world navigation. Our current world situation is in a similar situation, more or less. Between now and 2058, a lot of innovation will happen that is likely to take us there.

“By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.” - Daniel Kahneman

The question is on ethics and if AI replaces some of the key emotions that humans possess. This question has been asked in multiple movies from the link provided earlier. How we feed intelligence or good things are how we feed our mind. The mind is like a garden. It’s in one’s own hands on how to nourish it like an expert gardener. You can build a beautiful, aromatic garden filled with positive energy and good things emanating from positivity or a garbage tank with a nauseating stink emanating from negativity and bad memories. Like the saying “Garbage in; Garbage Out” our external outlook becomes a self-reflection of what we are internal – on what we choose to nourish our minds with. If we suffocate ourselves with garbage, we suffocate ourselves with the negativity that kind of impacts people around us, while doing most of the damage to the self-esteem and outlook we have. The Same logic applies to AI on how Supervised and Unsupervised learning takes place. In addition, how AI build’s its own knowledge base continuously.

In 2007, Larry Page quoted in an interview “One of my favorite things is artificial intelligence, but it has gotten a very bad rap, but my prediction is that when AI happens it’s going to be a lot of computation and not so many clever algorithms but just a lot of computation. My theory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 megabytes compressed, so it’s smaller than any modern operating system, smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system, that includes booting up your brain. So your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. We have some people at Google who are trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale to make search better. Very few [other] people are working on this, and I don’t think it’s as far off as people think.” 

Tautologically speaking, the Human brain has a capacity of 600 MB – good enough to store in a DVD at the most. The caveat is most humans do not use their full capacity (as highlighted in a sci-fi fashion in the movie Lucy) and usage neurons and dendrites can give of permutations is the number of moves in a game of chess when it comes to thinking and decision making. This unpredictability, driven by DNA and experiences, knowledge and wisdom is the key puzzle that is getting addressed as we speak.

Having said that, a lot is happening already in AI domain.

“Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking everything we’re doing.” — Google CEO, Sundar Pichai

Consider these factoids and data points/links on AI

• Read through a couple of brilliant posts on AI
• 1) A collation of thoughts on what's next in computing - https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-s-next-in-computing-1226232735
• 2) A brilliant Infographic on AI and a Brilliant article - via Futurism - The embedded Infographic is brilliant https://futurism.com/ai-will-bring-about-the-biggest-transformation-in-human-history/

• In 2012, Google only had 2 deep learning initiatives. Now, it has over 1,000 projects.
• AI delivers the recommended movies and shows you see on Netflix and performs the facial recognition in Facebook’s DeepFace, Delivers news feeds, Google’s Searches
• Human professional experts get beaten by AI driven machines – be it Jeopardy! Quiz Game, Go! Or Poker
• We have Human Mind-Reading Robots that decides based on how humans think- https://www.fastcodesign.com/3068713/mits-mind-reading-robots-understand-the-one-command-that-matters
• Google can search videos now – driven by AI (https://newatlas.com/google-ai-video-searchable/48348/)
• AI Chatbots and Assistants are already making its way into mainstream - https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/09/hugging-face-launches-app-to-be-your-ai-friend/
•  A startup from Finland - Curious AI does cutting edge research, pushing the boundaries of the machine learning commonly called artificial intelligence today towards the elusive limit of true artificial intelligence. The proprietary patents the research leads to are the future incomes of Curious AI – a business model similar to pharma’s, with long risky development, but a big payoff at the end.
• Curious AI

• As per an Article in a Physics Magazine https://phys.org/news/2017-03-physicists-quantum-machine-infinite-dimensions.html, Physicists predict that quantum machine learning combining the speed of quantum computing with the ability to learn and adapt, as offered by machine learning will result in faster deduction and better algorithms for continuous variables is that it can theoretically operate much faster than classical algorithms. Since many science and engineering models involve continuous variables, applying quantum machine learning to these problems could potentially have far-reaching applications. This means stock market trading, travel to outer space, cure for incurable diseases, human behavior prediction etc can be solved, if it becomes a reality https://thenextweb.com/contributors/experience-next-level-automation-internet-things-iot/#.tnw_fcQ3kF5R#.tnw_AFdxyy5g
• AI driven body cams can help law protection agencies to become more informed and intelligent - https://gizmodo.com/new-ai-could-turn-police-body-cams-into-nightmare-surve-1792224538
• IBM is developing technologies in speech recognition that is already at super-human level - https://www.businessinsider.in/ibm-speech-recognition-is-on-the-verge-of-super-human-accuracy/articleshow/57562260.cms
• A lot AI led of innovations are driving business to the next level. A TechRadar diagram from Forrester highlights the top focus areas that will eventuate in next 10 years.

• Self-driving, driver fewer cars capable of making decisions in case of adverse events
• Virtual Assistants/Chabot’s performing customer service activities, removing the need to speak to a human person to get an activity sorted.
• Robot Financial Advisors replacing humans and progressively managing more assets, delivering better returns than a human advisors.
• A Japanese firm recently laid of some financial professionals, replacing them with AI-driven software.
• By 2020, an estimated $2.2 Trillion will be under the management of Robot Advisors
• Even for menial jobs such as flipping burgers, an efficient, AI-driven robots can be used, resulting in cost savings to restaurant industries
• Insurance underwriting process is getting replaced by AI driven processes, cutting down sales agents and commissions will make the insurance industry more streamlined and passing the benefits back to the customers, to make the insurance industry more efficient and competitive.
• Bridgewater Associates is moving towards an algorithmic financial activities management.
• Intelligent diagnostics based on health vitals helps make informed decisions driven by AI with data insights, replacing the need for super-specialists for simple diagnostic needs, while delivering the same high quality service.

“The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

• On the positive side of the use of AI, one positive social outcome can be highlighted. As per Fast Company’s April 2017 article, 80% of 55 million visually impaired people in India can get benefited by procedures like LASIK. Medical and surgical resources are limited to meet the need. In April 2015, the non-profit L V Prasad Eye Institute Joined hands with Microsoft India to create Connected Eyes, a cloud-based machine-learning research project using Cortana. Connected Eyes scans through tens of thousands records eye patients to predict need, success for new surgery, issue regression rate so that doctors can deploy those resources most effectively. Post the success, a global roll-out via Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eye care to build a universally available service that offers eye doctors immediate predictions for their patients. This will be a global pool of knowledge and machine learning and AI can set a precedent for positive outcomes.
• The latest development is Microsoft, along with Cambridge University Researcher have developed AI Algorithms that writes code, using DeepCoder. Using Garbage In, Garbage Out, the saving grace, for now, is that the algorithm reuses code available in the public internet. With Better codebook and libraries, it will soon have an edge over human programmers too. What this entails is that a machine with AI capabilities that is capable of writing its own code, modify and maintain, test, deploy and improvise. This is similar to what JARVIS does for IRON MAN or self-healing AI driven Robots that automatically repairs and enhance themselves. When such achievements are accomplished, certain nations may focus on getting a hegemony to control the power. Traditional firms will majorly focus on commercial aspects to provide a service.

“Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.” – Udacity Founder & Former Google Self-Driving Cars Expert - Sebastian Thrun

Like a Yin and Yang, all these advancements come with certain element of negative impacts as well. These challenges need to be addressed very carefully. Famous Scientist Stephen Hawking quoted to BBC “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.... It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.” This is possible, however, just like a control mechanism, this expansion can be managed if the humans hold the control key to these changes. However, unemployment threat is real. Bill Gates famously quoted that Robots need to be taxed like humans. This will certainly help Governments run the economy efficiently. Google ended its association with General Dynamics that is known for building Industrial Robots that could be used for various complex purposes.

“The threat of technological unemployment is real.... For instance, Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to replace much of his workforce. The robots will take over routine jobs like spraying paint, welding, and basic assembly. “- MIT Professor Erik Brynjolfsson

 At the end of the day, the world will be a better place if we have efficient AI that

• Adheres to ethical laws abiding the rules of the land and have an Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights
• Adheres to controls similar to ICANN assignments for Internet or NSG or NPT for nuclear weapons to ensure nothing gets out of control
• Can be controlled efficiently by Humans without concern for losing the control to machines
• Are sentient and capable of having human emotions to deliver ethically valid decisions
• Are capable of performing intelligent and efficient actions driven by effective algorithms
• Is self-repairing, capable of building things quickly in a constructive manner
• Is secure, capable of avoiding harm to humans, society, and self
• Is capable of nullifying cyber-attacks and criminal or terrorist takeovers
• Is capable of preventing state driven military hegemony

“The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that? “- Gray Scott

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