Current state of information in the machine learning era: a writer's perspective

Ten years ago, if someone had told you that you could get an assistant to run errands for you, for literally no cost at all, would you have believed in the proposition? One step further, would you have bought the idea of instructing a virtual assistant and taking assistance in tasks such as driving you to work and getting your kids dropped to school or even having a casual conversation with your assistant when you are bored? The world of artificial intelligence has transformed our perception about the capabilities of machines interlaced with data and human intelligence, and has unraveled a world of immense possibilities. It wouldn’t be far when the super heroes and villains of the Guardians of the Galaxies would be walking alongside us being one among us.

It was with much awe and speculation that the enthusiasts in the artificial intelligence space witnessed what Google Duplex is capable of doing. Earlier this year, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai demonstrated how intelligent their virtual assistant was in that it understood natural language to an extent of interpreting the nuances of a conversation and made sense of even difficult and unusual scenarios. It was trained to be intelligent enough to judge the responses and respond with alternate solutions. This was something we wouldn’t have dared to venture into before knowing the capabilities of natural language processing, deep learning, and machine learning.

Artificial intelligence is the buzz word today and an overwhelming and overused topic in all the major technology conferences and publications. Upskilling the existing workforce to be able to take up the challenges of an ever-increasing demand for skilled workforce with human computer interaction knowledge, has become the priority of companies. Individuals are slowly waking up to an era where machines could even overpower its own creators and rule over the world.

So, what’s in it for me as a technical writer?

Am I going to lose my job? The answer is “definitely not, but I will be in a better position if I upskill myself sooner or later”.

Artificial intelligence is going to change the way we have been treating content, both raw and processed. There is going to be a lot of unlearning and learning. The popular rule of active vs passive may soon become redundant, the topics may become conversational, and we may have to mine into the immense pool of data available on user scenarios and user queries in the form of frequently asked questions, or customer support call logs, and talk in terms of micro content to answer specific questions for specific goals.

Of course, it may take a while for this scenario to take life, but if we channel our learning and capabilities to accommodate the changing needs of machine learning and the way consumers seek assistance for the products and services they consume, the writers lot will be the most sought-after clan.

What may seem simple to a common man involves years of research and introspection by technology enthusiasts and scientists around the world. The various models that have been developed to process the copious data overflowing from the cloud and on-premises have been developed so that machines can make sense of the unstructured data and learn what they have been trained for. Information developers do play an important part here, and artificial intelligence is only going to aid us in our job rather than throw us out of our jobs.

As humans, we are gifted with one capability that the machines have not yet been able to master, and that is judgement. Some of the challenges faced by deep learning methodologies and models are that although tapping the neural networks has made the machines much more intelligent adding a few human traits of reasoning and judgement, there is still a long way to go until they match up to the conscience of human beings and start behaving like us. Sophia, the first robot to have been given a citizenship by Saudi Arabia is an attractive and intelligent robot who frowns when a bad joke is thrown at her or dismisses the idea of a kiss on a blind date. But she lacks the most valuable quality sought in a human – emotions and conscience.

Researches are now moving towards that space where we would eventually learn to trust the machines even if they are devoid of the quotients of conscience and emotions. And eventually, who knows when we would dismiss all these speculations and acknowledge the machines that would, by then, have a conscience and be emotionally charged as well.