Artificial intelligence is quickly gaining steam, from the Amazon Echo to Google’s assistant.
So why is AI catching on now? And what does it mean for the tool’s of the future? well we’re going to cover some of the main predictions of AI within this blog post.
Robots and AI will keep us safer, especially from disasters.
AI for robotics will allow us to address the challenges in taking care of an aging population and allow much longer independence.
It’ll enable drastically reducing, maybe even bringing to zero, traffic accidents and deaths.
And enable disaster response for dangerous situations, for example, the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.
We will all become cyborgs.
I really think in the future we are all going to be cyborgs. I think this is something that people really underestimate about AI. They have a tendency to think, there’s us and then there’s computers. Maybe the computers will be our friends and maybe they’ll be our enemies, but we’ll be separate from them.
I think that’s not true at all, I think the human and the computer are really, really quickly becoming one tightly-coupled cognitive unit.
Imagine how much more productive we would be if we could augment our brains with infallible memories and infallible calculators.
Society is already wrestling with difficult questions about privacy and security that have been raised by the internet. Imagine when the internet is in your brain, if the NSA can see into your brain, if hackers can hack into your brain?
Imagine if skills could just be downloaded using quick exploits — what’s going to happen when we have this kind of AI but only the rich can afford to become cyborgs, what’s that going to do to society?
Implants will make humans better at everything.
Making humans better, making what humans want to do and what humans want to be, easier to achieve with the help from AI.
What if you lost a limb and you couldn’t swim as fast, what if an AI can actually know how to control this robotic limb that’s now attached to you in order to quickly and efficiently let you swim?
AI will turn us into superhumans.
I think combinations of human and artificial intelligence are fascinating and have the potential to create combined systems that are smarter than either alone.
We already see this in many applications of AI — For example i’m smarter when I have access to Google.
Future systems may work via augmented reality or by giving us sensory abilities far beyond existing vision, hearing, and manipulation.
For example, I hope that exoskeletons will allow me to walk when I am old and feeble.
I hope that I can retain my sense of hearing and sight even as my eyes and ears fail.
Very smart computers could solve all our problems, including climate change.
If you had a system that could read all the pages and understand the context instead of just throwing back 26 million pages to answer your query, that kind of program could actually answer the questions asked.
It’ll be like if you asked a real question and got an answer from a person who had really read all those millions and millions and billions of pages and understood them and been able to synthesize all that information.
Everything we have of value as human beings, as a civilizaton, is the result of our intelligence and what AI could do is essentially be a power tool that magnifies human intelligence and gives us the ability to move our civilization forward in all kinds of ways.
It might be curing disease, it might eliminating poverty. I think it certainly should be preventing environmental catastrophe. AI could be instrumental to all those things
AI might even save the world.
When we’re talking about something that is at least 50 to 100, maybe even a thousand years away, it’s very speculative. But when and if we have that, I would say that the sky’s the limit.
All these things that we’ve contemplated, whether it’s space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems.
I view today’s computers as souped-up pencils but nowhere near the potential that they could have if they were able to perform effectively, much more sophisticated.
AI will open up whole new worlds to explore.
I really think that robotics are going to improve the way we work, the way we live, and the way we explore new frontiers — if you think of the ocean, if you think of space. I think this will be done incrementally, because it’s a hard thing to do.
I think it’s going to also be integrated in the sense that you might have a robot car, but you’re not going to think of it as an AI or a robot, you’re going to think of it as a car.
A lot of these things that we’ll be introducing will be seen as helpful technologies, just like your cell phone is a helpful technology, but not as lots of robots entering our work or entering our homes. They’ll just be seen as smarter tech.
Some of these amazing applications are already here, and it’s making people easier to predict.
Basically what learning is about, including machine learning, is using the past to make predictions about the future.
You might be able to predict who will start dating or who will get divorced. You can figure out when people are going to have kids sometimes by just the stuff they buy and what neighborhoods they move into. You can figure out more and more intimate details and be able to predict what each other will do.
People are already getting really good at predicting what we are going to do and then manipulating that to get us to buy things, or to vote particular ways.
