The age of ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence !
With optimism, many of us believe that we’re living in one of the most innovative time in human history, heading for an era of abundance, progress and related benefits.
After decades of effort and billions spent on research, we’re progressively cracking the code of next generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with tremendous breakthroughs that should improve our personal lives & our customer experience across all industries.
What used to be constrained progress due the lack of data and access to large Datacenters & computational facilities is no more. Machine decisions result now directly from learning from large cloud-based datasets. Today’s automation and AI with Machine Learning systems rapidly exceed the capabilities of their creators, solving problems that no human could reasonably be expected to tackle.
AI has been around for many years, and is increasingly part of our lives. As we certainly have a tendency to anthropomorphize any kind of intelligence, today AI doesn't look anything like what most people see in Science Fiction movies : most AI today is Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) named also Weak AI, using Machine Learning & Deep Learning techniques, excellent at performing very specific tasks like image recognition.
Even though it turns out that AI is not the same as human intelligence, or at least it looks that way right now, the introduction of sufficiently advanced AI has profound impacts on most aspects of society.
From an economic perspective, the possibility of complementing or substituting expensive human-level tasks with cheaper AI, advanced software, autonomous & automated systems promises very rapid growth rates and high productivity gains.This is the promise of the algorithm economy.
In our virtualized & cognitive economy, AI becomes ubiquitous, many AI omniscient systems already observe our individual and group behavior, fighting each other over the opportunity to game our financial systems or to influence our consumer habits, performing work and doing business on behalf of their owners.
While we could all agree on the positives, it seems that we never quite reach an agreement on the risks and downsides effects on society, on life disruption, its ethical impacts, related or not, to any defects or incorrect adoption.
As we have always created and used our technology to extend our reach, many predict that we will become highly dependent on very smart software bots assistants and embedded AI, to help us with almost everything in seamless interactions.
The advent consequences of a troubling Human-level “Siri” assistant like AI, as realistically portrayed in "Her" futuristic movie with Joaquin Phoenix, is openly controversial, considering that our happiness and well-being could totally be dependent on the algorithm control of our lives.
Although such a Strong AI, a self-learning human-level & autonomous Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can, is still to be created - we must not forget that AI technology remains a double-edged sword, the kind of friend that asks for both trust and obedience.