Cognilytica’s AI Enabled Vision of the Future - Autonomous & Augmented Everything (Part 3 of 5)
Cognilytica Insights
AI is transformative in so many ways that we believe it will dramatically impact all corners of our lives. We explored the basis of Cognilytica’s AI-Enabled Vision of the Future in the first newsletter issue of this series:
We dove into what the AI-Enhanced Organization will look like in our second installment, and in today’s newsletter we tackle what it means when everything is augmented or made autonomous with AI.
AI-Augmented Everything
?? In our previous take on the idea of Autonomous everything in 2018 , we dove into the idea that whatever can be AI augmented, will indeed be. The idea of augmented intelligence isn’t to replace the human, but augment humans with “super” capabilities. Using AI, people will be able to perform tasks that previously required significant skill or talent, or just took too long. We can use the skills we're good at, such as critical thinking, intuition, creativity, common sense, and have machines do what they’re good at: processing large amounts of data, spotting patterns, and generating outputs based on those patterns.?
In the AI-enabled future, because AI is truly everywhere, even in things that it shouldn’t be in, that means AI will be in everything. If there is even a slight chance of improvement to have AI put into a product or service or experience, then AI will be added. But other times, adding AI capabilities to a product sometimes is done simply for PR benefit. Sprinkle a bit of “AI magic dust” on your product, and the once boring solution becomes some super-smart “something”. In this way, we’re going to see literally everything become AI augmented - your clothing, your glasses, your bathroom, your retail experiences, your house appliances like ceiling fans, microwaves, ovens and doors, your furniture, your shoes, ad-infinitum. Everything that can have AI in it will have AI in it.
Autonomous or AI Enhanced?
Back in 2018, we discussed how autonomous everything will change the landscape around us. This was primarily because autonomous vehicles captured everyone’s attention. We reasoned, why stop at just autonomous vehicles, when we can apply the autonomous pattern of AI to all sorts of things.
But thinking this through, we realized that the impact of autonomous vehicles and systems had huge downstream impacts. With autonomous vehicles, houses might not even have garages or driveways, or will garages be the autonomous loading and delivery docks of the future. Already the remote workforce has had an impact on urban life, but autonomous systems will have even more impact on the growth of cities and suburbs and the idea of parking lots, parking garages, and street layouts. Autonomous trucking might lead to autonomous-only highways and streets to improve safety and efficiency. Even bicycles and other modes of transportation such as skateboards, rollerblades, motorcycles, and scooters will get autonomous capabilities. In this vision of the future, driving cars might be the curious hobby of the future just as riding horses is today. In the AI-enabled future, few will own vehicles, since they can simply call them on demand. This will no doubt change the look and feel of a society currently so heavily dependent on owning and driving vehicles.
When it comes to the autonomous pattern people always think about autonomous vehicles. However, there is so much more than can be autonomous. We can have fully autonomous homes where appliances turn on at the exact right time, and at-home robots can prepare meals, perform security tasks, and do all manner of chores. Do people want these bots operating in their homes without their supervision?
However, the autonomous pattern is the hardest pattern to implement. Autonomous systems need to be close to near perfect for people to trust them, and the development of autonomous systems are very costly and take long amounts of time to test and debug, which means they are the most difficult to achieve short-term ROI. This is why before we see autonomous everything, we’ll first see AI-augmented everything.
The AI-Embedded Pushback
Already we’re starting to see AI embedded in solutions that may or may not need them, from AI-enabled toilets to wearable devices that have very little reason for being. So in this AI-enabled future, where AI is embedded in everything, we need to realize what sort of changes that will make in our society and expectations. If we are going to be looking to AI-enabled systems to make us more efficient, then what are we expecting people to do with their lives? What problem was autonomous vehicles serving to solve in the first place? Do people want to get from point to point without paying attention to driving? If so, then what happened to public transportation or just using a ride sharing service? Are self-driving autonomous vehicles something we really need, or is it like flying cars and jetpacks, where in reality, we don’t want a world with everything flying and driving around us.
Outside of devices, we will find AI enabled in all our interactions. We will be communicating with AI systems in our shopping and retail experiences, as well as in our healthcare and finance experiences, and customer service interactions. We will have to deal with the new reality that we can’t believe everything we see, hear, or read because it will be too easy to generate something that looks too real. This means we will have to learn how to verify all our interpersonal interactions, as well as develop new reflexes around not trusting any digital outputs.
This also means that we will inevitably see a pushback from those who do not want their activities or interactions enabled, moderated, or involved in any way by AI. In the AI-enabled future, we will find retail and other experiences promoting themselves as “AI free”, if that’s even possible. We will also find a call for more “primitive” or “artisan” products and services that are advertised as having “no AI” in any component. We will also seek out experiences that are far from perfect, because we will see that flaws define the human experience. Those that are too perfect will be seen as AI augmented. While we might want those experiences in our business, financial, healthcare, and other professional lives, we might not want those in our personal and social lives.?
This also means that in the AI-enabled future, today's laws and regulations will be hopelessly obsolete and antiquated. In the AI-enabled future, we will have to deal with wide ranging changes to privacy, bad actors enabled with AI to cause all sorts of criminal activity and mischief, challenges to misinformation and disinformation, the ability for people to consent to the use of AI or get disclosure of AI systems, challenges around transparency, and ability to appeal or contest AI-enabled actions. Just like today, we see signs posted that mobile phone use is not allowed in certain places, so too we will see similar signs for the use of AI-enabled devices. How will we even detect if AI is being used in these “banned” areas?
? What does the AI enablement of everything mean for our own personal experiences? What does it say about privacy and the collection of data about our everyday activities? Stay subscribed to learn more in the next parts of our series on the AI-Enabled Vision of the Future!
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