It's "Time" for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has the potential to give us access to more of our most precious commodity- time.

The movement of seconds, minutes, and hours happens all around us and is inexorable. We all have devices that remind us how quickly time passes. Phones, watches, office clocks, and deadlines continually inform us that we are losing time. Children growing older, our parents passing into their final golden years, favorite pets approaching the end of their lives, these things also give us pause to reflect on how quickly the time has passed.

It has been said that time is our most precious commodity. We mean to do everything on our task list, but no matter how much we try it seems that the hours in the day run out before the tasks on our list. Much of what we do is dedicated to capturing some of that time back to be used for things we have to do or things we love to do. We organize to help improve efficiency, which gives us more time. We look for ways to do things faster to allow us more time to do the things that may have been left behind.

Stop and think about time. Stop and think about the advances humanity has made over the last several hundred years. Everything we do has moved forward by developing ever greater efficiencies. Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line, which at its core allowed for automobiles to be manufactured faster (an element of time), which meant that more automobiles could be manufactured in the same time frame (an element of time), which ultimately increased the dollar value of every minute spent manufacturing cars (another element of time).

Arguments can be made for every advance- technological, military, industrial- being rooted in some sort of “increased time efficiencies”. Moving from the musket to the rifle enabled a soldier to fire more bullets per minute. Truman's decision to drop “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was ultimately a decision rooted in time. It was Truman’s hope that the use of atomic weapons would accelerate Japan’s decision to agree to an unconditional surrender. That acceleration, moving faster, was an element of time, and in this case time meant a quick end to the war. The alternative, the non-accelerated solution, was a land invasion of the Japanese home islands that would have cost hundreds of thousands of allied lives and extended the war for 1-2 additional years (if not more).

Artificial intelligence is a time accelerant.        

It is true that artificial intelligence is not intelligent without categorized data, and lots of it, used to train the AI. However, an AI can look at an overwhelmingly massive amount of data and do so with the speed that humans simply cannot match. Artificial intelligence can reach into the well of knowledge it possesses and access every bit of that information to provide the best possible answer. Humans simply cannot do this without external help.

The development of new pharmacological compounds used to require intense work and a massive amount of man hours. Brute force was employed by researchers and scientists as they created compounds, waited to see how they reacted with their environment before they even tested them for efficacy, and simply throw away the ones that didn't work along with all of the time and effort put into the failure.

Artificial intelligence can take information about every combination of different compounds, the research history of these compounds both individually and when mixed together, and then use computing power to virtually simulate how these compounds would react. A human scientist might spend days or weeks on one compound, while our medical AI would be racing through dozens of compounds over the course of a few days.

While artificial intelligence works on determining how compounds could fit together, our scientists could suddenly find themselves with that most elusive of commodities- time. The sudden availability of this time means that the scientists can spend it doing things that artificial intelligence is not yet able to do, and use the things that come out of this newly discovered time to help improve the efficiency of the artificial intelligence.

Law enforcement agencies can use time freed up by artificial intelligence to focus on community outreach, more complicated cases, and more serious crimes.

Working parents could gain more time to spend with children. Teachers could use their free time to help struggling students. Mental health professionals could use free time to benefit patients or look for the latest therapeutic advances for use within their practice.

AI has enormous potential to give us back time. Artificial intelligence could be employed to handle those tasks that eat up time in our day and yet are often considered menial or do not seem to yield any direct benefit. A sudden influx of newly discovered time in our day could yield visible benefits for employer and employee alike. Perhaps our employees would be happier. Perhaps our employers would realize that a person can accomplish more in a smaller chunk of time with the increased efficiency provided by artificial intelligence. Could our teachers find themselves with enough time to work with every child instead of just the few who might need it? Could community outreach benefit from more time to spend in the communities they serve?

It is difficult to imagine a job that could not be affected by artificial intelligence. Even the oft-cited example of a ditch digger could benefit from the use of artificial intelligence; it could provide information on the most efficient way to dig based on the type of land, advice on the use of the latest ditch digging techniques or even build autonomous robot diggers to assist.

All the benefits mentioned within this article and so many more left unmentioned are almost certainly going to be a part of our future. The challenges created by these benefits, however, must also be addressed. Everything from curing society of the stigma associated with not working to helping people with positive activities to fill newly discovered “free time” will need to be considered. Even a seemingly utopian concept like universal basic income will likely be a part of an AI driven future and is something we will discuss in next week’s Perspectives “Privacy of Me” newsletter.