From Automation to Autonomous … a “Human – Machine” reimagination …!

Automation has given new hopes to the enterprise by removing the human in the loop from the workflows that were built on all the yester year processes and bring in autonomy into the business world. 

The process owners in the previous two decades fell prey to the philosophy of aligning the processes to the tools instead of imagining process autonomy, this debate of buy vs build or buy and customize is a very old one and the Business – IT community both have their own arguments which certainly are justifiable from their own points of view.

This blog post is an attempt to visualize the next decade and hyper advancement in research areas that will gift the next millennial generation a promise of bringing science fiction into reality.

The industry experts, analysts and the business world today are trying to find answers and ascertain facts on how will human bodies, thoughts and behaviors evolve...

How will the intersections of these evolutions impact experiences.

The answers for questions like this can be found in the “Transhumanism Philosophy”. This the school of thought that refuses to accept traditional human limitations. Enhanced intelligence, Enhanced Sensing, Disease free bodies, Sport optimization, Enhanced Strength, Increased attractiveness, Digital Biometrics, Ubiquitous and continuous monitoring etc… are all branches of this stream. Futurist topics, including space migration, mind uploading and cryonic suspension, etc... are the advanced researches in this area.

In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might use implants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans

How Can Enterprise adopt this Philosophy into business ?

Transhumanism is a cultural and intellectual movement that believes we can, and should, improve the human condition using advanced technologies. AI enthusiasts and practitioners have a lot to contribute here, some practical use cases the business can look at will be in the areas of Autonomous AI, Neuromorphic Computing, Multimodal AI and beyond, here few are some bold imaginations.

EMBEDDED RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS

·        You no longer need an external GPS, or a search engine, one can have it embedded into the human body, may be as an eye lens or any other part of the human body that can carry an automatic navigation mechanism, search recommendations, in fact most of wearable technology today can be embedded into the human body instead of seeing it separately. Imagine Google in your brain and you get to access all that you today are accessing or searching on the system or hand-held devices, imagine the business possibilities, in my opinion this will be a multi zillion dollar industry. We today use less than one percent of our brain and if such embedded items help simulate our brain, this will be a huge datacenter with limit less opportunities.

AR / VR with HAPTICS

·        Touch plays a wide role in the way we perceive our surroundings and also how we interact with them. Virtual reality is moving out from seeing into sensing. AR / VR with “HAPTICS” is the science and technology of transmitting and understanding information through touch. Gaming, Simulations, Military Training, Remote Repair and Maintenance, Remote Surgery (Healthcare), Retail / Shopping Industry and a few more are good sectors the traction will soon be seen.

. It will be less than a decade you may use your smart phone and touch someone, such touch will feel like physically touching someone or something.

. The Design Research Lab in Berlin, Germany has developed a haptic feedback glove designed specifically for blind users to improve texting capabilities. The Glove allows the blind by tapping various sensors and receive text via vibrations.

PAYMENTS

·        Another innovation is a use case we see in Payments area, the brain now becomes a datacenter with the IRIS Scan and Voice command to complete the payment.

ARTIFICIAL LIMBS and MEDICAL BIONICS

·        Artificial limbs or what we call as bionic prosthetic devices not necessarily shall only help the disabled but can also be a style statement and may be enhancing human capability overcoming its limitation. Imagine bionic shoulder enhancement which can give you an ability to carry 1000 KG weight as compared to max 20 – 25 KGs you can carry today. 

·        Medical Bionic implant / Artificial Organs market is a potentially growing one with a global market of $17.82 billion in 2017 and growing at 8% CAGR, Vision Bionics, Ear Bionics, Orthopedic Bionics, Heart Bionics, and Neural/Brain Bionics are already in demand and very soon you will see this to be a fashion statement. Advancement in 3D Printing will accelerate this proposition.

. A German company, RETINA IMPLANT, has already succeeded in developing an electronic chip that, grafted behind the retina of blind subjects, gives them partial sight by stimulating their brains, while the biotech company CARMAT has developed an artificial heart.

CRYONICS

·        Many a organizations are active in providing Cryonics as a service, its more popular in the west and seen lot of traction in US and UK regions.

Maintenance of a cryo-patient requires no electricity, but replenishment of Liquid Nitrogen every three weeks. It’s time for such replenishment to move out form manual monitoring to intelligent monitoring to ensure the organics are maintained right and there is no cell decaying.

Cryonicists argue that as long as brain structure remains intact, there is no fundamental barrier, given our current understanding of physical law, to recovering its information content.

In London in 2016, the English High Court ruled in favor of a mother's right to seek cryopreservation of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter, as the girl wanted. Cryopreservation was applied to human cells beginning in 1954 with frozen sperm, which was thawed and used to inseminate three women. The first body to be frozen with the hope of future revival was James Bedford's, a few hours after his cancer-caused death in 1967 and is still preserved today.

MIND UPLOADING

·        Mind uploading is another area that is catching up a lot of interest with few experiments successful in the labs. One such vision is to see how a human mind might transcend its unitary limitations by permissioning partial resources to join a multi-party mind and connect them all into one mind - one consciousness. Just like how Internet today connects all of us tomorrow we will see the minds of all humans connected. While there are many positives, imagine the negative side, it may be more dangerous than the dark web.

INTERFACES - BCI / HCI

·        Interfaces (BCI / HCI) are the areas that are seeing applicability growing out of the labs, one can invest his time and attention to acquire skills here. Use cases are plenty in the BFSI area, Payments example as I mentioned earlier, BCI technology can be a communication bridge between human brain and the external world eliminating the need for typical information delivery methods.

Disabled people can write down their opinions and ideas via variety of methods such as in spelling applications, semantic categorization, silent speech communication. Neuromarketing, Advertising and Neuro-ergonomics are applications that are catchup in the business world where such ideas are finding commercial value.

NEUROMORPHIC COMPUTING and ENGINEERING

·        Neuromorphic engineering is a growing technology area, A neuromorphic computer would offer many advantages. It could learn with far less inputs than the current neural networks, learn from unstructured input, will be able to deal with noisy input and consume much less power. There are many business applications of this technology, to quote a few are Smart Agents with distributed computing and continuous learning, Improved healthcare Services powered with neuromorphic perception and computation to adapt their behavior, Industrial applications like Anomaly Detection, Automation of Controls, Manufacturing Design, Defect Detection, Safer Driverless Cars,

Neuromorphic computing is slowly moving to commercial stage.

• Intel has created Liohi chip that has 130000 neurons and 130 million synapses, and it can self-learn.
• Pohoiki Springs system combines 768 chips to provide 100 million neurons.
• IBM demonstrated creation of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses using 16 TrueNorth chips.
• BrainScaleS physical model at Human Brain Project (HBP) uses analogues systems to create 4 million neurons and 1 billion synapses using 20 wafers.
• HBP’s Spinnaker systems aims to simulate 1 billion neurons.

COMPUTER VISION

·        Computer Vision extending beyond todays AI and content / image extraction into microscopic full spectrum vision. Some birds of prey have a vision so sharp that they can spot a hare a mile away, we have a compact devise that can scan the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to Radio waves and everything in between. Our Eyes in their current form can do none of these things.

While these are the focus areas, I will encourage the readers of this blog to contribute with ideas into risk mitigation so that the adoption of this technology can accelerate.

Risks we foresee that need to be overcome for business adoption and acceleration Transhumanism

Techniques of evolving human will raise a lot of question evolution of thought raises the spectra of unwanted control change in definition of humanity and society there will be concerns are unable to anticipate today.

Some unanswered questions that haunt us today are …

-         Exposure of hacking brain and other body implants or control 

-         Brain and Body implants may completely change a person's identity

-         Challenges about maintaining memories that would have naturally faded away

-         Transhumans can boost their mood to the direction (high / low) they chose on demand that will impact the performance and the outcomes.

-         Imagine brain and human body being manipulated with variables adversely change the nature of human interactions and so the decision making or a facilitated communication within the digital world

In fact, the answers are available us in mythology, such answers are available to us in the ancient scriptures of could be Greek, Roman, Indian, Islamic, Mayan …. one must look at getting out of the lab and be bold enough to curate lessons from the forgotten ancient scriptures that carry deep and rich information. People need to learn and the day we have create a framework for Risk Mitigation or Risk transfer or Risk Aversion mechanisms we are going to see the adoption accelerate at the pace which will be uncontrollable.

Walk back to the "2005 - 2007" timeframe, there was an explosion of handheld devices, mobility, apps, cloud, social media gained exponential momentum … and today every kid is born with a Smart Phone in his hand just imagine where we are heading towards, it’s just a matter of time may be another decade from now, our next door neighbor or a family members tomorrow will be a human-machine, one may choose to marry a machine and not a human anymore, the lack of adoption or fear rather is due to various unanswered questions governing the ethics, once we have answers for these slowly but surely the risks will be overcome, and adoption will accelerate.

Trust this blog post triggers some grey cells. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] if you too carry similar interests in Transhumanism and Singularity or any parallel and alternative technologies and believe one day such advancement will be the new reality.