Planet Earth is Booting Up for Another Upgrade

Artificial Intelligence Revolution

First thing first, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a Sci-Fi Movie concept. It is a real scientific endeavor, where serious people have spent part or in some cases, whole of their professional life. John McCarthy, the computer scientist who is known as the father of AI (He also coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1956), once said, “We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don’t realize it’s AI. As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore. Because of this phenomenon, AI often sounds like a mythical future prediction more than a reality.

"Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can, in principle, be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." – John McCarthy

There is no doubt that the intelligent machines are going to be a reality in near future and irrevocably impact our lives, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. What's more worrisome and may eventually become a question of Mankind's survival, is the moment at which the Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) upgrades to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). And according to Ray Kurzweil (the famous Futurist and Scientist, who has accurately predicted AI system growth path for years together), that moment is just three decades away.

However, as all evolutionary process go, things starts with little imperceptible changes, which over a millennia, forms completely a different product, process or species. The AI Revolution 'in making' is different just in it's time scale, measured in computing power rather millions of years. But before I get into the details, let me take you back to the times, when the planet Earth was born.

Planet Earth is booting up for another Upgrade

In the history of Planet Earth’s 4.543 billion years of existence, there have been many upgrades, and probably the most recent one has been the creation of Human Kind. As the universe expanded from the Big Bang, I believe mankind’s evolutionary progress has been marked by quantum leaps rather than an analogous flow of change. While it took two billion years for single cell organisms to become multi-cellular, it just took two hundred million years to make Homo Sapiens out of the first mammals to inhabit Earth. Since then, there have been many such quantum leaps (e.g: Getting to stand up, cooking food, the use of language, farming and in recent times, the formation of civilizations, Green, Industrial and IT revolution). And now we are on the verge of another leap with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

But before we move further on AI Revolution front, let’s look at a curious phenomenon from our planet’s evolutionary history – The Birth of Flowers. Plants have had existed in relative calm for millions of years before the flowering plants arrived in Jurassic Era. But this delicate and fragile addition of evolution, profoundly altered Earth’s ecosystems. With the security of reproduction and far reaching ‘pollination’ Technic, flowers easily replaced most of the ecosystem’s 'seed plants' and became the basis of agriculture in agrarian and modern society.

And here we are at that cross road again... booting up planet Earth with 'Flower 2.0'.

AI is the flower, bound to replace the existing digital eco-system and more

Steam mechanized the first Industrial Revolution and electricity powered the second to mass produce. To automate production, the third Industrial revolution used electronics and information technology, on which the fourth the Digital Revolution thrived. Four Billion people are using the internet to search, and every day 3.5 billion searches are processed. Mankind is spending the equivalent of almost a billion of years online, every year.

The current AI breakthroughs and technological advancements are at the level of disruption, which has no historical precedents. This makes it ripe for AI to flower - to harness different silos of Technology and begin to boot up ‘Flower 2.0’ to pollinate and collaborate with all the other forms of digital / IT / Tech systems. This system of 'Neural' knowledge network will exponentially grow to deliver solutions and technology far beyond what we can imagine now.

AI Revolution - The Current Scenario

My colleague Nitasha Sreekumar (Technology Partner, India – GTS, Cushman & Wakefield) says that AI is not a ‘New Kid’ on the block. We are already using many AI embeds in Google Searches, Automobiles, Mobile phones, etc. We are at ANI – Artificial Narrow Intelligence level, which basically means that a machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a ‘specific’ thing.

However, the larger issue facing the AI community is its inability to mimic intuitive thinking. AI has surpassed our brain’s calculative power a long time ago, which was globally showcased as the Deep Blue defeated chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov, in 1996. The famous computer scientist Donald Knuth succinctly puts the challenge facing AI, which has succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ as its failure to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’. Another famous computer scientist, Vernor Vinge believes that we are on the verge of change, comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The world of 2050 will be so vastly different than today’s world that we would barely recognize it.

The Impact

AI systems may automate 5% of all the jobs by the end of 2018, however it is difficult to plan for an AI invasion. Futurists believe that the professions that will suffer the effects of AI Revolution most will be mundane jobs like Junior Level Lawyers, Journalists, Drivers, Chefs, Telemarketers, Customer Service Executives, Medics, Construction Workers, Manual Laborers, etc. To provide a context to the Job loss, it amounts to 47% of current existing jobs in America which are at a high risk of potential automation in the near future. But as Roshan Gowda (CRE Lead & Assoc. Dir – Accenture) pointed out, in one of the sessions at RICS CRE Conference 2018, we should not undermine human ingenuity and adaptability in face of AI onslaught. The nature of jobs may change but there will still be jobs to constructively employ people, if they are willing to upgrade and up-skill themselves. Speaking at the conference, Anshul Jain (Country Head and CEO - Cushman & Wakefield) also believes that the early adopters of AI System in the build market will be the young startups. 

"Young start-up's will continue to surprise us with innovative use and early adoption of AI System and cutting-edge technologies." - Anshul Jain

Read the Article "What Artificial Intelligence Revolution means for CRE Sector?"

The Future

From ANI, the technology will be moving towards AGI – Artificial General Intelligence, which refers to a machine that can perform any task that a human being can. The final frontier on AI is ASI – Artificial Super Intelligence which, a leading AI thinker, Nick Bostrom defines as an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, wisdom and social skills. From the AGI level, the ability to reach the ASI level is exponentially fast. It has taken decades for AI Systems to reach low-level general intelligence and in a decade or so, a computer will be able to understand the world around it as a four-year-old human. Within hours of hitting that milestone, AI System will reach ASI – almost 150,000 times more capable and intelligent than the human brain.

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." - Vernor Vinge

With our normal human brain power, we have been able to control distant objects through Wi-Fi / blue tooth etc. Imagine what a million or billion times smarter brain could control. It will have no problem in manipulating every atom in the world in any way it likes, just the way we control light with the switch of a button.

END NOTE: “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. By 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence… a billion-fold.” - Ray Kurzweil