I completed my diploma in Business Analytics in Aug last year and will have my graduation event in May. This had started me since late 2017 on a learning journey of understanding what is out there in the world which I am not aware of. https://www.tp.edu.sg/courses/part-time-courses/industry/ict-and-media/specialist-diploma-in-business-analytics
The initial 6 months was tough for me, being one of the oldest students in class and not quite tech-savvy, to grapple with new data mining software and trying to digest technology concepts after being a marketing guy for so long. But it started to open my eyes to how much I did not know – it was a frog-in-the-well-looking-up situation for me. I was amazed at how much interactive analytics we can do now, versus my manual Excel spreadsheet kiddy stuff.
Then my wife and I did an Alibaba business study trip to Hangzhou and it blew my mind away as I realized how technologically backwards we were, compared to the motherland. https://www.sirsdigitalcommerce.com/alibaba-ceo-programme.html
That yearning to seek more information made me do an Introduction to FinTech MOOC course by HKU. I figured out that I needed to fill in the gaps I had on this topic as everything I know about FinTech was a mishmash of titbits of information gathered online. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-fintech
I now know that FinTech consist of the 4 pillars namely ABCD: AI, Blockchain, Cloud and Data. FinTech is the digitalization of Money while TechFin is the monetization of Data. What stood out for me was AI (Artifical Intelligence) and how little we know about it. We watch Marvel superheroes and Westworld to imagine what AI is like – it is just fantasy and we are still so far from that being a reality. It started my new life long learning quest to know more about this subject.
The HKU course led me to a series of free Microsoft (MS) online courses on Teva. I then subscribed to a number of them which I thought would benefit me. Intro to AI, Deep Learning Explained, Intro to Big Data, Intro to Data Science, Data Science Essentials and Analyzing & Visualizing Data with Excel. https://www.fevaworks.com/maicp/
These courses made me realize that what I was doing for my diploma was actually related to AI! Sorting out massive amounts of data and then using modelling technics to create predictive/cluster/neural models with software like SAS Enterprise Miner. This is the genesis of AI, the building blocks. Having a module on Social Media analytics also helped me appreciate how computers read and recognise/understand human languages.
These MS courses are now preparing me for the online course that I will start next week: AI in Finance. https://www.cfte.education/aifinance/ This is my continuous AI learning journey and it fascinates me immensely the more I delve into the subject.
Meanwhile, thanks to an old friend, I chanced upon a well known AI expert who had just released a book on AI: Kai-Fu Lee. The author believes that China could overtake America in AI soon. https://aisuperpowers.com/
He had a very interesting life journey that took him to Apple as the top AI language recognition expert in the early 1990s with John Sculley, ending with being the head of Google China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee He heads a Venture Capital fund since 2009 and had a recent medical scare that changed his views on work-life balance completely. There are a lot of youtube videos which one can watch about his thoughts on AI and philosophy on life. He is a very popular authority in China and speaks from experience and authority.
I am almost done with his latest book and the general themes are: (1) China will overtake America in AI soon, (2) 40% of current jobs will disappear in 10 to 15 years time, thanks to AI.
The Chinese government realized that Data is now the new oil and China can become the new OPEC. Given that privacy was never a big concern for them and that their citizens value convenience more, they set about to announce policies to advance AI as a top priority national project a few years ago.
The new wake-up call to China was ironically AlphaGo, the movie which I had spoken about in my early blog. https://www.alphagomovie.com/ He took some time to explain how AlphaGo came into being with the tech breakthrough of Deep Learning in 2006 by researchers into neural networks. This process mimics the human brain and allows machine learning to reach a new level of expertise not seen before.
AlphaGo’s DeepMind creators, after beating the best human player on the planet in 2017, went on to develop AlphaGo Zero, which learned to teach itself how to play Go from scratch. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/
This reinforced learning eventually resulted in it beating its predecessor 100 to zero games, an unbelievable thrashing of the machine that just conquered the best human mind. As recent as early this year, they have moved on to beat humans in strategy games like Starcraft II. https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612832/deepminds-new-ai-just-beat-top-human-pro-gamers-at-starcraft-ii-for-the-first/
He goes on to describe the stages of AI as Internet AI, Business AI, Perception AI and Autonomous AI and the emergence of O2O (Online to Offline) that changed China within a few years to a totally cashless society with little or no friction for financial transactions.
He cites examples like Uber/Didi that disrupts the industry from the ground up. China the nation that copies from the world previously has turned the notion 180 degrees around – the world now watches in awe as it is able to transform its economy via quantum technologically leaps, skipping many traditional evolutionary steps. Its ecosystems are pulsating and throbbing intensely as China shows to the world how every ounce of efficiency can be squeezed and optimized. Same day delivery? How about 30 minutes now? Honesty and integrity in the eWallet systems? Done. There is no stopping this tech tsunami. While the rest of the world moves on another slower track, China will be powering ahead within its own orbit.
AI systems can now only be a single focused algorithm with a single objective as the end game. They are not smart or creative enough to encompass multiple spectrums/arenas yet. But with this limited ability, they are already able to make minced meat of the narrow objective then they work in. Take driverless cars for example. When it arrives in a few years time, look at the number of humans that will be displaced. Whole industries (truckers, cab/bus/Uber drivers etc) will be made redundant. By then, we may not have the ability nor luxury of time to jump to another higher level skill not threatened by AI. 40% of the job force eliminated is not a fantasy…
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