Future of Artificial Intelligence
My goal in writing this book was to show the practical side of Artificial Intelligence and convey the feeling that it can be used in your business right now, whether you work at a large enterprise, run your own startup or you’re a freelancer. In this final chapter, I want to focus on what’s awaiting us in the future and discuss some issues related to why AI was so hyped in the first place.
Knowing what to expect is crucial if you want to prepare for the next decade or the next century. At least if that’s still possible as changes occur faster than ever before. This exponential growth might stay for longer if automated machine learning (autoML) solutions became implemented on a large scale, allowing algorithms to tune themselves on the spot. As more jobs are being delegated to machines, it’s worth asking whether humans will be at all necessary when it comes to work. There’s no easy answer to that.
We are all cyborgs
A cyborg, as we know it from sci-fi, is a mix of human and a machine. Cyborgs are depicted in comic books, in sci-fi movies and video games and still seem a thing from a distant future. However, we are all cyborgs already. Most of our computational and communicational power, as well as our memory, is digitized and exists on the cloud or in our smartphone. Most of us have our smartphone within a hand reach for 95% time of the day, and we feel uncomfortable without it. We also feel inconvenient about a bad connection to the web or no wi-fi at all. That’s how closely attached we have become to our devices.
This trend of becoming one with our devices will only grow stronger in the years to come. New generations will not know the world without the Internet, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and all the other devices, which make our life more comfortable and smoother. Technology is making our lives more convenient, and we’re happy to embrace it.
That’s why it seems natural (sic!) that we’re going to become even more attached to our devices. Think about it this way: if there was a quick, non-painful process to implement smartphone capabilities within your body so that you won’t need any external device to call, chat, surf the web, would you do it? Probably yes.
Artificial General Intelligence
In this book, I have depicted AI as an utterly practical framework for solving problems. However, a lot of people, when they think about AI, think about some powerful being, independent and intending to destroy the human race (e.g. Terminator), which is far from any predictable scenario. If AI destroys us, it’d be because we will use it as a weapon against each other.
Nevertheless, there is a concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a constructed entity capable of any menial task humans could do and performing it at least as well as humans do. AGI is the end goal of all AI research, the ultimate prize for solving machine learning problems. We don’t know yet how to get there or even if it’s even possible, but if it is, then that will be the greatest discovery of humankind ever made and also probably the last one. With enough computing power AGI will be capable of doing research by itself, faster and better than any team of researchers. Moreover, it will be able to deploy its own research right away, growing only stronger and faster. It will be a single entity able to dominate any domain within a short amount of time. Depending on your views on humankind and our future, that might be a scary or an optimistic vision. Elon Musk is one of the strongest advocates of controlling AI research because of the possibility of creation AGI within our lifetime. The malicious use of AGI would probably mean the utter destruction of everything we know. On the other hand, the safe and beneficial use of AGI would result in an amazing growth of the human race. That’s why it’s of utmost importance to make sure that AGI will be available to good agents, which would operate with a goal to benefit humankind.
We don’t know how far we are from AGI currently. We could be hundreds of years away, or we could be 20 years away. But we shouldn’t take risks here. Artificial General Intelligence is just a concept, but the transformative power of AI is real and is currently changing how we live and interact with each other. With or without AGI, we should strive for safe and beneficial use of AI systems, democratising access to AI and technological education, and making sure our tech culture is inclusive and open to diversity. Only this way we can ensure that AI will bring a bright future for humankind, rather than an apocalyptic dystopia.
Choices we make today will influence our future like never before.