Technology Convergence: is it all good?
We have made tremendous advancements in technology and some of the things that appeared impossible a decade ago look quite real now. While every technology savvy brain is busy improving the lives of people in any manner it can, the coming together of all such progressive technologies could become a matter of serious concern. Artificial intelligence as of now seems to worry a few. A question that must worry all of us is, “Are we allowing our future generations to be governed by technologies that we create today?”
The world is becoming a place where technologies are openly shared and used for collaboration. The world is coming together in multiple dimensions. The degree of freedom (used to measure interconnectedness of people), as Facebook stated, is now merely 3.57 compared to 6 that was just a few decades ago. If similar measure existed for technology, the degree of unification observed will be much higher. This appears to be good thing, or is it?
In the future all machines will be interconnected both to humans and themselves. Humans will be too. All of our data will be connected and merged to a degree that applications will know from what color one likes to what toothpaste one uses. Eventually all applications will be connected too. What this means is that one device will be able to send signals to other device taking decisions by itself based on the data it has about you; so don’t be alarmed when your car automatically drives you to a gift shop a day before your anniversary. This is a good thing one can argue but there’s a greater problem too.
What this means is that humans will distance themselves from controlling their own lives by the virtue of remaining connected to the machines. Say, I buy a fit-bit. This is one application that monitors my physical movement, heart rate, blood pressure and other stuff. This data goes to cloud. In the cloud this data gets merged with my health records, data from my insurance companies, my social profile and my work profile. All the various applications collectively use this data for creating some actions. Now, the insurance application finds out that I have high blood pressure and live a sedentary lifestyle. Say one day I do not go to the gym and the insurance application sends a signal and just locks my refrigerator (weird example but just imagine for moment). This very well can happen because of the interconnections. And I may not have significant control. These application will function in a manner in which they have been programmed – either to benefit me or my life insurance company or somebody else.
Artificial Intelligence is not just a set of programs trying to understand user behavior, predict things or find a way out of a puzzle. It is also about setting rules for various things, how things could be done, what is right and what is wrong as defined by the inherent logic in the AI codes. So the quintessential question becomes, whose welfare will be maximized?
As a personal opinion, I believe that the technology convergence must be regulated by the government or some organization before it’s too late. Global warming brought everyone to the table for a discussion, this is no less of a concern. In the future the welfare of the society will be predicated on how some of the computers (or machines whatever we may call it) decide things for us. Someone needs to see that the computers are taught the right set of principles.
“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it" ― Eliezer Yudkowsky
Bring Transformation to Life
8 年Not sure the government is essential to a reset on underlying principles and objectives of business; isn't it the domain of human nature. It is a real concern whether the majority of resources will be focused on short term profitability for the few vs. maximization of the pursuit of happiness by all.
Echoing Remco's thinking - does anyone remember the Ada programming language disaster of the 1980's? The idea was to come up with a universal language that could be used for a wide range of purposes, so that the DoD would only have to train programmers in a single language and they would be able to maintain code across a wide variety of platforms. That effort turned out to be a huge, expensive waste, because by the time the specifications were done, the language had become so bloated and inefficient that it performed poorly and was basically impossible to deploy for anything useful. Sure, the government can participate in the standards activities (which are open to anyone), but let's not use a politicized, bloated bureaucracy to dictate standards for rapidly advancing technologies.
Architecte Cloud AWS
8 年What you say is realistic and interesting. I like the way technologies can bring us some help like health records but to me, it has to be limited. I like to have the choice and decide what I do for my body. If the future decides for you (as you show with the example of the refrigerator and the insurance company), we are not free anymore. The role of these kind of technology is still ambigous, we should discern what we really need.
Founder at Leemonad Technology Services. We are Cyber Security, IT & Telecoms Lead Generation Specialists. We offer best services for our customer's needs and requirements.
8 年this is an interesting read, if not in parts quite scary too!