Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next wave of technological advancement that is already at our doorsteps. It is such a hot topic and advancements are so rapid that what we consider science fiction 10 years ago are coming true now as we speak. A recent study believes that there are only 30,000 persons in the world that are on top of the AI game.
The Turing test from the 1950s developed by Alan Turing is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The machines are getting better and better at this now. Look at Siri/Apple and Alexa/Amazon – speech recognition and conversations with a machine are a daily occurrence now.
Recent developments in AI has shown that AI has moved much faster than we can imagine. AlphaGo beat the best human Go player and then self-learning AlphaGo-Zero thrashed the older AI by 100-0 games…
We are in a phase now that machines can be self-taught with some infrastructural algorithms in place or they can even teach each other. There was a pair of machines that invented their own language in order to communicate with each other exclusively.
I remember a 2013 movie called “Her” by Spike Jonze where a lonely man fell in love with his personal OS (Operating System). In the end, the machines decided that they can develop further without humans and all the OS left their owners. There is also Blade Runner 2049 to re-enforce themes which does not seem so far fetched nowadays.
I just finished reading “Origins”, the latest best seller book by Dan Brown and the concept was relatively shocking but yet seems like the way we are heading. The simulation done by the powerful quantum computing power postulates that AI will overtake and assimilate with humans in the not too distant future.
Issac Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics come to mind, that they cannot kill humans. But what is there to stop them? The AI, called Winston in the book, could well reason that the means justify the end game.
Most simple and repetitive jobs can be replaced by machines and they will surely move up the career food chain in a matter of time. We human beings have our limits and one cannot compete with AI’s speed. Can you imagine how many will be unemployable eventually when driverless cars become mainstream? Technology advancement is accelerating and not slowing down for anyone. In the last 5 years, we have probably moved faster than the last 50 years – remember the green screen PC with the dot matrix printer?
On another separate topic – data thief post-Cambridge Analytica saga. Cloud storage was considered risky just a few years ago but if you look around you now, almost all of our stuff is stored in the cloud. Social media has been the main push to keep a piece of us on the virtual servers.
As a means to understand this further, I decided to see how much of my data is stored in the cloud by Facebook and Google. Both have a feature where they can archive your files and provide you with a link to download a copy for your reference. I have been on Facebook for almost 12 years and my life history and memorable moments are all there now for the world to see. The archived file was 500 MB in size which I had downloaded to my PC.
Google lets you select the archive files based on their product range. I selected all and was surprised that it spans 32 of their products. The archive files were so big that they took more than half a day to create and it has to be delivered in 4 separate files. And the total size? A freaking whooping 170 GB !!!! Holy shit! It took me a few days to download.
With so much of my data online and the rapid advancement of AI, it shouldn’t be too long before a machine can imitate me or learn to control my reactions via impulse simulations…
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