( A three-minute read for all Americans and all of us who value the freedom of a Vote)
This week, Americans elected a new president who had essentially no support from mainstream politicians or media, SENDING THE CAPITALIST WORLD INTO A FRENZY OF VERBAL DIARRHEA.
How on earth did this happen?
Something else (aside from the design of the Electoral College) was needed to put Trump in the White House.
You don’t get people to see things your way by calling them idiots and racists, or sorting them into baskets of deplorables and pitiables, but with the help of Twitter and Facebook you can sow the seeds of discontent whether true or not. Its called virtual community manipulation of what they do rather than where they are.
To speak the truth is no longer needed to gain power.
If you bend your values in challenging, strained times they’re not worth much at all when the going gets better.
In that sense, this posting may seem futile, but to any Americans reading this who are presently frustrated by a political system that does not necessarily reward the candidate with the most votes I would pass on this observation.
It is very interesting that the great symbol that is situated in the harbor of New York City, the Statue of Liberty, is a woman, carrying a torch, with her book of wisdom in hand, the crown of light atop of head, and a torch of light held high with her right hand.
She is the keeper of lost wisdom and the guide for lost souls.
She is also a painful reminder that the liberty she promises is now becoming enslaved to a world of algorithm systems.
Trump was much better than Hillary Clinton at social media use.
Trump’s Twitter — full of ranting tweet storms and things he regretted — looks in broad outline like the account of a human who likes Twitter. Clinton’s looks like a brand.
Plainly, Trump’s election and the Brexit vote are rebellions against elite opinion — that is, against political orthodoxy and its defenders.
In both cases, the question is, how does one account for the uprising?
There’s no single reason.
What they have in common is anger at the existing economic order, and the use of social media.
You might think that after a price tag of $6.8 billion in vested interests (That’s more than what consumers spend on cereal ($6 billion), pet grooming ($5.4 billion) and legal marijuana ($5.4 billion), would produce a leader better than a man who has spouted misogynistic, racist, xenophobic and climate change-denying views.
Not so.
As we’ve learned in this election, bullshit is highly engaging, with Mr President Trump not giving a flying toss whether he Tweeted the truth or otherwise, but it means that Twitter is harmful — it provides an echo chamber that confirms and intensifies dangerous false views — then there’s not as much it can do about it.
Tweaks to the algorithm won’t help.
As a result we can all look forward to having the biggest megaphone in the world in Jan of next year.
We are entering dangerous times not because of Trump’s Election but because Facebook and Twitter algorithms, of a shapes and sizes are now deciding the government of the United States not the vote.
Both Facebook and twitter news feeds were responsible for fueling “highly partisan, fact-light media outlets” that propelled Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
But Facebook is just a clicks-and-shares company.
Its mission, its ethos, is that people should tell their friends and family what they’re up to. If what they are up to is making videos of cats doing funny things, Facebook doesn’t care if the videos were staged. And if what they’re up to is sharing anti-Semitic memes and fake news, then … I mean … what?
Facebook’s DNA is in the sharing business, not the truth business, and its thinking about how to deal with the truth and harm of what it shares is inchoate and muddled.
It is not far off the truth that both of these companies optimize their content for popularity and profit rather than truth. Behind the scenes, Facebook has been studying and analyzing its effect on news consumption.
They are as old as for-profit media. In general these companies start with an ethic of truth-seeking and fairness that then may or may not be compromised by the quest for clicks and shares.
Where does all of this leave modern-day democracy.
With the unwinding of economic linkages the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful countries face a slow-moving but potentially devastating political and economic crisis.
If we all stay silent when men brag about sexually assaulting women. If we accept lies and hate speech about women, or migrant, refugee and Muslim communities.
If we stop pushing to prevent catastrophic climate change.
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” It’s easy to lose something you don’t even know you had.
Mr Obama would do well during the transition of power to bring the President elect to see the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The liberty she promises is not slavery to world’s system of Facebook, Twitter or the Internet of everything.
It isso that humanity as a whole can muster the courage to seek the truth.
This can only be achieved by the simply use paper ballots not The Electoral College. Not computerized voting machines.
The problem with algorithm systems is that one can’t guarantee that the software is doing what it is supposed to do. (see previous posts)
It is time we pulled aside the cloak, and take a good look at the real facts, and what they mean for us, today.
The United States electoral system remains a work in progress, as it has for more than 230 years. Surely it time to remove the power of the $ and save the rest of us from eighteen months of bickering.
All comments welcome. Or if you like join the silent brigade and press the like button.
Artificial intelligence is not just the frozen father of TRANSHUMANISM it will decide much of our future.
Clearing away that mental block allows one to see a dazzling landscape of radical possibilities, ranging from unlimited bliss to the extinction of intelligent life.
The future will be filled with digital implants, mind controlled exoskeleton upgrades, age reversal pills, hyper-intelligence brain implants and bionic muscle upgrades.
All of these technologies will literally make us dependent on autonomous inventors of algorithms run by software. So the sense one gets from this and other futurist predictions is that the future they predict is in the past.
Transhumanism is undeniably being actively pushed by mass media and promoted as something that is necessary and inevitable in the future. That way, when it will actually happen, nobody will be outraged by it, it will be considered as something normal.
But transhumanism will only be available to the richest and most powerful people and the world (the world elite) and will created an even wider gap between the “masses” and the “elite”.
Yes. Change happens, and to the victor belong the spoils.
Mr Trump. Represents the rising power of individuals against states, a growing middle class that will increasingly challenge governments, and ongoing shortages in water, food and energy and climate change.
However Artificial Intelligence in the form of unsupervised algorithms represents the hidden agenda of dying capitalism and where real power will end up. In the hands of a few.
If things continue in the current direction, the future we face will likely feature more starkly enforced social rules accompanied by fewer science achievements.
When machines start to make themselves smarter, without the need for people to make them, very strange things may happen.
As we consider the varieties of human experience of the future, and the kinds of modes through which we may eventually coexist with intelligences other than our own we are deeply irresponsible not to consider any regulations by Universal Laws Governing Scrutability of all technologies using programming algorithms.It could result in a two-tiered society comprising enhanced and nonenhanced persons, a dynamic that would likely require government oversight and regulation.
Soon, man intact with all his natural parts, may be available only in museums.
Advances in information technologies and AI are combining with advances in the biological sciences including genetics, reproductive technologies, neurosciences, synthetic biology.
With our devices becoming twice as powerful every eighteen months with more and more sophisticated algorithms we need to be vigilant even if the programs don’t, learn, understand or anticipate in the way we humans do.
We are entering an age of NEW SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS.
You don’t have to look far to see what is happening.
Just yesterday we witness the first autonomous bank robbery in the Uk.
Autonomous systems, whether drones or automated trading systems are infiltrating all our lives.
The democratization of Knowledge by Google and the Internet are turning into the colossal repository of human knowledge.
The human brain via genetic and bio-engineering with the nuclear family as a social unit is coming under fire from Facebook.
There are all sorts of speculation concerning AI.
The truth is that robots are not likely to become self-aware or decide that you are redundant.
As always the threat as ever is us.
Combined this with greed by Algorithmic bias to profit, (This time it will be with blind stupidity beyond anything we have seen before) we will end up relying on systems that are inscrutable because of no one programmed them.
The current regulations which are non existence are already outdated.
For example they don’t recognize that computers are already producing patentable inventions.
Computers are no longer a simple tool but autonomous inventors.
Should the technology be developed in the first place?
To what ends should it be deployed?
How the technology is to go forward, how should it proceed?
How and who do we monitor Technologies to ensure adherence to transparency?
Is the technology committed to equality, available to the less well off?
Is there a level of intervention, and accountability?
Who is responsible when a program goes awry?
We need to consider what limits we place on AI ?
What restrains and safeguards should be placed within these programs?
The list is endless.
If you think that this is all hogwash.
On August 12, 2013, something remarkable took place at the University of Washington. Professor Rajesh Rao sat down in his laboratory and put on an unusual-looking cap, covered with electrodes. This headpiece was connected to an electroencephalography machine – a computer with the ability to read signals from the brain.
Then, with the power of thought, Prof Rao was able to move the finger of his colleague, Andrea Stocco, sitting half a mile away on the other side of campus. Stocco himself had no choice: his body was simply responding to a command sent by Rao, transmitted over the internet.
This historic experiment represented the world’s first human brain-to-brain interface, and was replicated with a further six volunteers in November this year.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COMPUTER LEARNING IS PREDICTED TO HAVE A GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMPACT BETWEEN OF $5.2 AND $7 TRILLION BY 2025.
It is going to have impacts way beyond the purely technological and economic.
As Abraham Lincoln said ” You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”
Its time for a Independent, transparent, new world Institution, to set the Regulations and Laws governing all aspect of technology.
The out of date United nations is totally incapable of supervising the far reaching effects that Artificial Intelligence is having, or going to have and all of us.
In my last post I said that future societies will be driven by a culture of individuality.
I should have said individuality manipulated by an underbelly of Algorithms exploitation by Artificial Intelligence.
Why?
Because there is enormous opportunity for manipulation in big data.
Because the internet’s ‘cacophony of stimuli’ and ‘crazy quilt’ of information have given rise to ‘cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning’ – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative.
Up to now human beings have been organizing their own societies, their own governments and their own religions according to the way that seems right to them from past history. Not any longer. With the smartphones distracting us from our surroundings we are at the beginning of the technological end of written history.
Thinking use to be the inner activity which is absolutely independent of any other, and is a firm point … from which … one can seek for the explanation of the rest of the world’s phenomena. Thinking now is asking Google.
The world is becoming increasingly chaotic because the increases in our technologies have made the world highly interconnected. At the same time, values and ideas which were considered universal, such as cooperation, mutual aid, international social justice and peace as an encompassing paradigm are becoming irrelevant. In other words, our brains are being rewired by internet.
Nowadays humans are abandoned, left alone to decide what to do with themselves. Everybody must be integrated into the vast cultural homogeneity that is the Internet to the abandonment of Intuitive social sensitivity, which is also disappearing and becoming the fodder of Facebook – selfies and ego. We are raising a generation that is already being exposed to such collaboration.
It’s like a zombie plague:
Our connection with our new creations of Artificial intelligence is limited by our ability to co-evolve with silicon- based machines.
So are we on the brink of intelligence enhancement or will our biological evolution of our species essentially change for the worst?
The organic characteristics of a species is being lost to AI so that beneficial traits cannot be passed onto subsequent generations. What we are presently seeing everywhere in terms of social and individual decay may very well be consequence of an AI world.
Technology will not automatically lead us into a sustainable future and it is becoming impossible if not too late to influence dominant commercial technological trajectories thatare run by AI monopolies and are of course for profit.
You would think that algorithms cannot be developed or become widespread and dominant without socio-political, economic, and cultural mechanisms to steer innovation in the “right” or most desirable direction.
You would be wrong.
Unfortunately current science and technology do not deal with morality and ethics.
Corporate unregulated algorithms Software for profit is eating the world.
We need a deeper appreciation for what is lost when a new technology becomes part of our lives as well as what is gained. It requires more value placed on ethics and social responsibility. The degree of depletion of natural resources, including air, water and agricultural soil (what a paradox: our materialistic age is destroying matter), the increasing social and economic instability and misery everyone can observe makes it absolutely urgent that we change something.
Think for ourselves.
In thinking we posses self-determination. There is no machine, not even an abstract one, that has this self-determining feature. Machines inexorably follow their programs or mechanisms – otherwise they would not do what we expect from them.
You be wrong to think that five centuries of European colonialism and global culture-trashing, and the remaking of the world in the economic interests of competing empires, cannot be undone by a single institution and a cluster of lofty ideals.
Just recently five of the largest tech companies got together to create a coalition called The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to benefit people and society.
No one is asking the cost or hurt that could be done to the world. AI for profit will have no ability to improve social equality.
The power of the smallest of intelligence advancements has the power to yield enormous gains for humans, individual and collective if we ensure that we don’t trade- off our human values to AI algorithms that are already actors holding our future in software programs.
Robots, Drones, High Frequency Trading, Cybercrime, Job Losses, Privacy Infringement. Irritating Personalized Ads, Gaming, Smartphones.
I could be wrong. There are still people here on God’s green earth who can conduct their social lives without being marketed to. But when you take a long view a global cyber imperialist is being created by AI where traditions are disappearing along with their social cohesive power.
The world’s mess is like a web, so intricate that each issue is intertwined with another. However, instead of unweaving it, the web becomes more complicated and interlaced by the day. So, how do we untangle ourselves from this giant mess?
Your guess is as good as mine.
It all calls for greater transparency of scientific and technological enterprises. Social helmsmanship of technological innovation in the direction of sustainability is a very challenging task.
It’s no wonder we’re all such a mess, is it?
Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI. The tipping point is already past, digital threads are woven too deeply into human life.
We can’t go back, only forward.
At the moment there are a couple of decades to reset the mindset. It’s a race between technology and education.
We are not recognizing what a living being really is, what being human really means and what human development should mean. There’s something distasteful about the whole business:
I’ll give an example of this situation.
A global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires (The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence) to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads.
Take a look at the effects of Facebook.
But what about Facebook?
Is it really altering your mind? Absolutely. Significantly.
It is changing the physical structure of your brain’s neural network, which even changes how you feel about yourself and other people. And in ways that may surprise and enlighten you. What it is doing however much the company spins it as altruistic, is really an act of self–serving techno-colonialism. Impoverishing people’s relationships, stripping out essential elements of human contact.
“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
It is time for our out of date world organisation- the United Nations to take a decisive, role to create eye openers for some unpleasant surprises ahead if we are not careful and vigilant about technological innovations. The problem is that the United Nations is incapable of doing so, because it’s a unity of entities defined by their hatred of one another and committed to the perpetuation of “the scourge of war.”
But the main problem is that the “mindset[s] of government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into blind artificial intelligence. It will be too late when we all come to realize the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.
The narratives we create for the future of Artificial intelligence and subsequent high intelligence will determine our decision-making, consciously and subconsciously..
If we carry our human brain power in a small portable device like Smartphones and IPads we will forget that humans – and plants and animals, for that matter – have not been designed and constructed by humans!
The degree of depletion of natural resources, including air, water and agricultural soil (what a paradox: our materialistic age is destroying matter), the increasing social and economic instability and misery everyone can observe makes it absolutely urgent that we change something.
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Man is a hybrid. From a lower order we have been genetically manipulated by advanced intelligences into what we are. Now that in itself is dynamite for god’s sake.
Think about it.
Supersmart AIs will perhaps soon colonize the solar system, and within a few million years the entire galaxy. The universe wants to make its next step towards more and more unfathomable complexity.
When HI plus AI eventually merge we will have the most significant advancement in our capabilities with or without intelligence in History. The unacknowledged legislators of the world.
So Algorithms, the underlying process of decision in Artificial Intelligence systems are imperfect, prone to the bias of profit, and unpredictable decisions that will impact the Future.
The thought of the elimination of human emotions and the fact that the machines can’t distinguish a right from a wrong implies they have and will never have any morals, a vital part of human existence.
It will lead more humans into making unnatural and morally wrong decisions, because of only relying on predictability accuracy of the machine.
The real test of Ai or Super Intelligence is to be a stupid as a human not as smart.
Wisdom (which seems at the moment in the world to be in short supply) is the bucket of water needed if AI is to learn what we value and not the exclusion of intelligence to these algorithms.
There is no argument: To make sense of the universe, we sure could use the services of super-smart machines as long as we’re super-sure they know their place that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. Such technology could end up outsmarting financial markets, scientists and political leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.
Most current AI research is being done by big IT corporations including Google, Facebook and Apple, and research groups funded by them.
When genetic codes were cracked the question was asked, will corporate profits trump the public good? The same question applies for AI.
A couple of final thoughts.
There’s a line of speculation that human intelligence will be amplified by the artificial kind, using virtual reality technology, so that it stays ahead of the smartest AI. And intelligence of the human kind is the product of living bodies in a living world. Could the infinite richness of this biological experience be the X-factor that keeps it on top?
There is only one way to make algorithms (that are not contributing to the good of mankind but to profit, to contribute, is to regulate them.
By passing a law that all profit-making AI software must contain a collection chip to contribution a commission of 0.05% to a World Aid Fund. (See previous post on World Aid Commission)
Just think what such a fund could achieve with a source of perpetual income. It would change the United Nations from a worthless begging gossip shop to an Organisation of value.
Anyone is welcome to challenge !
If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance don’t bother commenting on this post.
The ideological core of our civilization is hollowing out due to technology.
We are living on the parentheses of a new era. Unfortunately most of us don’t know or don’t care, or perhaps its fortunate that it so.
However, I think – WE ARE AT A CHOICE POINT OF A PLANETARY SOCIETY THAT IS GOING TO BE BASED ON INDIVIDUAL CULTURE.
These are the times we were created for and we need to act at this juncture, for the sake of our children’s lives, we must confront hard data and scientific projections that are dire, harrowing to contemplate.
AS LEONARDO DE vINCI SAID ” Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else”
Who wants to live in a world governed by algorithms, owned by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft or Apple. A smart world run on dumbing down technology such as smart phones.
I don’t.
Our present Science will only be 5% OF SCIENCE IN 2024.
Human nature is shifting to racial empathy which is going to shake the foundations of everything.
History used to take hundreds of years to develop now it is our life time. The maps no longer fit the territory of interactive, the stage of radical history.
We are not quite at the beginning of the new age because we are still haunted by the spectrum of the past but the reset button of history has being hit.
The larger question is how we redirect the collective activity of our species on the planet — if this is even possible.
Collectively, our actions in the next decade may well determine the future of our world.
What does this future actually look like? How do we communicate? How does it function? How is it powered? What value system is it based on? What does it feel like to participate in? What are we eating?
When we consider the short timeframe in which humanity must reckon with the ecological crisis, not to mention the unintended consequences of AI that we have unleashed, we do not have time for chaos and incoherence — for a slow-motion breakdown, the rise of Right Wing despotism, or the political vacuum created by Brexit and the winner of forthcoming US Presidential election.
Pretty soon, people may reach a tipping point, a collective realisation that our social structures — our political and economic system — must be reinvented. As that realisation dawns, an alternative must be ready with a plan of action, and working prototypes.
To ensure our continuity, we must distribute wealth and resources more equitably across the human community, as a whole.
The last few hundred years, since the Industrial Revolution, were a telescoped process.
During this time, humanity overcame local boundaries and became a globally interconnected species — in a sense, a super-organism. We continuously transform our physical environment to satisfy our needs and desires. Imperialism, colonialism, neoliberalism, capitalism, industrialisation, and even communism are all transitional systems. They meshed humanity together, crudely and brutally, connecting the entire species through networks of communication and infrastructure.
As difficult as it is to imagine, we must overcome the blind spots in our ideologies and belief systems. We must find the path that leads to a harmonic, peaceful unification of humanity.
This requires defining a new form of political economy that supports the restoration or regeneration of the Earth’s ecosystems, while allowing every human being to live decently.
It also means defining a new relationship to technology and innovation.
This relationship requires a New Institution in order to ensure that we address Artificial Intelligence. It must question the capacity of an aggregate of self-interested nation-states, as well as self-interested multi-national corporations, and a tiny coterie of the super-wealthy (the 85 individuals who control more capital than half of the world’s 7 billion people), to make the necessary course correction.
We may well be approach the threshold of ecological catastrophe that will force us to reinvent human society for collective benefit — for the benefit of humanity as a whole, as well as the other species that share this living world. This may seem farfetched , but all current indicators are telling us to do so.
Technology has a crucial role to play in this transition, but its power must be harnessed and mastered for ecological restoration and social evolution not for profit.
To build a regenerative society will require that we supersede the current global financial system, based on debt and compound interest, and use our social technologies to devise an economic system that supports healthy lifestyles and patterns of behavior.
How do we transform our social system to create a resilient or regenerative global society? What kinds of changes will be necessary? These questions must be asked, even as they shake the very foundation of our society…precisely, because they do.
For example, we must ask whether we want to reformed capitalism by enforcing it to become a “conscious capitalism.” By placing a World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over ( 20, 000 $), on all Arms sales. ( See previous posts)
Humanity has overlaid roads, train tracks, fiber optics, urban and suburban sprawl, across the surface of the planet. We have also constructed a global communication infrastructure, like a planetary nervous system, that allows humanity to communicate instantly, from anywhere across the globe.
If we can marshal our resources to confront the ecological mega-crisis, we can define a path beyond it that integrates cradle-to-cradle principles, biomimicry, and other principles that are symbiotic with nature, eventually producing abundance for all, while enhancing the health of the biosphere.
What sustainability seeks to sustain, above all, is some version of our current way of life, even though the evidence is totally overwhelming that it cannot continue.
Living processes, generally, don’t just endure or persevere. Life either flourishes and blooms, evolves and transforms, or it stagnates and dies. The rhetoric of sustainability tends to support the belief that our current form of post-industrial capitalism can be reformed — that it can persist, in something close to its present order.
If you take the time to look closer on today’s situation, through the veil of ignorance, it becomes apparent that most of our worldviews are still based on lies and that fear and lies are the prominent method of control today.
We are shortly going to witness the election of a new US president in a country where military expenditures dwarf the rest of the world but 1 in 5 U.S. children go hungry every night.
What do we see: A rich blowhard running for president. Tech-bro execs hoping to splinter off into their own anything-goes fiefdoms.
Technology has been the leading engine of change for the past 100 years and will continue to do so. The battle for the living room is currently in a full-out war between the leading tech companies – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix.
Facebook has surpassed the country of India, making it now the second largest country in the world.
This is creating a world where people think that they are engaged. A social and virtual world that is now just a marketing tool.
Sustainability.
In my view, the current language around climate change and its solutions is totally inadequate.
To motivate us to start the change we need to understand the root of today’s problems and see the ruling structures for what they are, and see how we all are a part of that structure.
Around the world, millions of children are trapped in an intergenerational cycle of disadvantage.
Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best prepare for the coming ecological decline?
The main difference of today’s way of manipulating the society is that the controlling powers choose to be hidden and are no longer showing their glory to the people. Instead they have made an illusion that the power is located in the hands of the democratically elected governments.
With so much labeled as sustainable, the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative.
We are in dire need of a large dose of Empathy and honesty:
Empathy transcends all the properties of the esoteric power structures.
Empathy means to try to understand and listen to the feelings and needs of ourselves and others.
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
When people think of artificial intelligence (AI) — the study of the design of intelligent systems and machines that make people’s lives easier — from software that can recognize objects and animals, to digital assistants that cater to, and even anticipate, their owners’ needs and desires. They are wrong.
Because.
Artificial intelligence is a broad and active area of research, but it’s no longer the sole province of academics; increasingly, companies are incorporating AI into their products. From Honda to Google, scientists at companies across the world are working diligently to make real-life robots an actual thing.
Since the field of AI was officially founded in the mid-1950s, people have been predicting the rise of conscious machines. It seems as though not a week passes without yet another AI system overcoming an unprecedented hurdle or outperforming humans.
Based on the exponential growth of technology according to Moore’s Law (which states that computing processing power doubles approximately every two years), Kurzweil has predicted the singularity will occur by 2045.
Humanity is not doing enough to prepare for the rise of artificial general intelligence, if and when it does occur.
It is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.”
It time that all machine-learning algorithms are vetted prior to use, by an independent transparent world body that has humanity , sustainability, and inequality along with monopoly as it brief.
Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.
For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.
“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
Who cares what happens to humanity?! If AI doesn’t kill us we will do it to ourselves anyways.
I say AI is our only real shot of leaving something meaningful behind.
The one consistency about predicting the future or warnings about future technology is how wrong people almost always are about the impact of that technology. The first man to split uranium didn’t do it to kill humanity wither, but here we are now.
Artificial intelligence can solve problems, but currently only real intelligence can think up new ones.
We will be inferior already. After all why fight a species that is already killing thousands of its own kind. We are our own damnation because of our “intelligence”
Unless the AI becomes aware, notwithstanding a superior intelligence, it will be no more a threat than the keyboard upon which I’m now typing this.
Once these contraptions got self-awareness it was good riddens. We are doomed to be at the mercy of these computers. The age of efficiency has begun. RoBoHon is a smart phone disguised as a robot. Heartless
I won’t be the last person to write on this subject.
The generation that is born into AI will I am sure develop relationships with robots.
They would do well to remember that the cortex of their brains records every conscious aspect of their personality, every sensation, thought, and memory of their lifetimes. Not Google
( A seven minute read, dedicated to my friend Bill)
As we rapidly move towards a human centric intelligent Society – a network of data, artificial intelligence that is mimicking the human brain on more and more levels, with the thinking being done for us by machine learning.
Intelligence is becoming more and more redundant, altering the structures of our societies.
Like ourselves deep learning Algorithms start out clueless, moving to a higher level, learning from mistakes.
As technology expands in its capabilities and applications we’ll be confronted with massive social change.
It will have sweeping implications for all our cultures far beyond a smart phone or a little cylinder that can order more cereal or play music on demand.
Luckily you don’t need much intelligence to know that AI is being developed because it can make big money, but there are going to be many unintended consequences to AI.
There will come a day when Governments will be consulting AI on the impact of certain policy decisions if it is not already happening.
The surprising thing about all this intelligence is, to this day how we exactly define intelligence is still debatable.
It is difficult to argue that there is an objective sense in which one definition could be considered to be the correct one.
I have always held that Intelligence is found in the bottom of a bottle of Whiskey.
Nasa could save themselves yonks of dollars if they realised this. Searching for Intelligent Life in the Universe ( when we don’t know what it is) seems somewhat pointless.
There is a wide range of conceptions of intelligence.
With the arrival of the Smartphone it now seems that we are all suffering from Trump dum-dum fever. This has led some to believe that intelligence may be approximately described by pressing the like button, but cannot be fully defined.
The use of Autonomous Machines, further challenges our thinking as it raises questions as to the relationship between humans and machines. These questions may become increasingly prominent as technology advances and AI becomes an integral part of our surroundings.
The development of self-learning and independent computers raises challenging questions as to the future of the human race and the control, or lack of it, humans would exert over machines.
The detachment between the algorithm and its operators also reveals
a potential failure to deter as algorithms are not susceptible to traditional
deterrents, such as jail, monetary fines, and shaming. In a digitalised universe in which the law’s moral fabric is inapplicable, any game theories are constantly modelled until a rational and predictable outcome has been identified.
Sophisticated computers are now central to the competitiveness of present and future markets. With the accelerating development of AI, they are set to change the competitive landscape and the nature of competition restraints.
Computer algorithms are transformed the way we trade and will continue
to do so in an increasing pace. The creation of fast-moving digitalised markets
yields many benefits, yet it also changes the dynamics of competition and
may limit it. Given the transparent nature of these markets, algorithms may change the market dynamics and facilitate tacit collusion, higher prices, and greater wealth inequality.
In such a reality, firms may have a distinct incentive to shift pricing decisions from humans to algorithms.
Humans will more likely wash themselves of any moral concerns, in denying any relationship and responsibilities between them and the computer.
If we don’t have AI we will all end up as a bunch of Apple /Google buffoons.
Isn’t it about time we defined Intelligence.
Here are a few current definitions.
Robert Sternberg. Sternberg’s (1985) theory of intelligence contains three subtheories, one about context, one about experience, and one about the cognitive components of information processing.
Howard Gardner.
Proposes a theory of multiple intelligences in which he claims there are seven relatively independent intelligences. Those intelligences are logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.
John Horn.
Along with his advisor, Raymond B. Cattell, has developed a theory of intelligence that specifies two broad factors, fluid abilities and crystallized abilities, along with numerous specific factors that support the general ones.
Fluid intelligence represents one’s ability to reason and solve problems in novel or unfamiliar situations. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, indicates the extent to which an individual has attained the knowledge of a culture.
The ability to use memory, knowledge, experience, understanding, reasoning, imagination and judgement in order to solve problems and adapt to new situations.
The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.
Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought.
The ability to learn, understand and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason.
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.
The ability to learn facts and skills and apply them, especially when this ability is highly developed.
The ability to adapt effectively to the environment, either by making a change in oneself or by changing the environment or finding a new one . . . intelligence is not a single mental process, but rather a combination of many mental processes directed toward effective adaptation to the environment.
The general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalizing, and adjusting to new situations.
The Capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : . . . the skilled use of reason (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)
Intelligence is not a single, unitary ability, but rather a composite of several functions. The term denotes that combination of abilities required for survival and advancement within a particular culture.
In its lowest terms intelligence is present where the individual animal, or human being, is aware, however dimly, of the relevance of his behaviour to an objective.
Sensory capacity, capacity for perceptual recognition, quickness, range or flexibility or association, facility and imagination, span of attention, quickness or alertness in response.
So is there such a thing as universal intelligence.
If you look at the present state of our world, our home, it would be hard to agree that there is any Intelligence that is Universal other than madness. We now have a world that is running out of control largely ( but not solely) because of information technology and what AI is making possible.
But the ability to accurately assess the intelligence of other persons finds its place in everyday social interaction which is being replaced and will have important evolutionary consequences.
I dont think so.
I believe that individuals’ intellectual performance varies depending on the situation in which they find themselves. Because of the vast array of different talents that people have there are different levels of intelligence and each individual has a different measure of intelligence.
‘Fluid intelligence is the capacity to logically solve problems independent of acquired knowledge.
Figurative intelligence describes the ability to handle objects such as images, patterns and shapes.
Are they independent of each other.
So if there is no such thing as one intelligence what is the nature of intelligence.
What is needed for better understanding of the nature of intelligence is to give more attention to diverse approaches to intelligence. This is needed because, “in a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is clearly out-of-place.
The brain as a major physical determinant of intelligence, without it we have artificial intelligence. The processing speed posing as the root for intelligence.
There are seven different areas of the brain.
Is the correlation between reaction time and IQ. The speed of information transmission.
Can the complexities of the human mind and its processes be reduced to a single factor, defined as intelligence?
Is there a single factor that determines intelligence, or are there multiple intelligences?
They are linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal and logico-mathematical. Not forgetting other facets of intelligent behavior such as athleticism, musical talent, and social awareness.
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It is the science of automating intelligent behaviours currently achievable by humans.
The ability of a system to act appropriately in an uncertain environment, where appropriate action is that which increases the probability of success, and success is the achievement of behavioral subgoals that support the system’s ultimate goal.”
Any system . . . that generates adaptive behaviour to meet goals in a range of environments can be said to be intelligent.
Intelligent systems are expected to work, and work well, in many different environments. Their property of intelligence allows them to maximize the probability of success even if full knowledge of the situation is not available. Functioning of intelligent systems cannot be considered separately from the environment and the concrete situation including the goal but they do remove intelligent apart from biological reasons for intelligence.
Those abilities analytic or practical that the individual uses in order to survive and succeed in society. Threat Intelligence Takes Many Forms
One may find it hard to imagine life without the power of computers.Let’s hope as we move towards this human centric intelligent society – a network of data, when everything is intelligence – nothing is intelligence, that the final machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
At least some aspects of our intellectual abilities depend heavily on our experiential histories.
“The only thing that exists is the present.
It has no beginning and no end.
The future is…
Now!”
Gone are the days that Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.
John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.
You might think with the state of the world we live in that this is some what a naive subject. If you are like me, when it comes to Algorithms I have little or no understanding other than they are beginning to reshape my living life.
Ironically, in the age of the internet and unparalleled access to information, the most critical questions are out-of-bounds.
While the web has broken down the boundaries between different nations, so you can read a blog by anybody, anywhere in the world, on the other hand all our laws and governments remain in national boundaries. Outside of that we have very limited amount of effective governance, collaboration and co-operation and understanding.
Moreover, while we are clearly pretty good at producing knowledge, using this knowledge – that is separating the wheat from the chaff and integrating this together into something useful – is a big problem particularly in fields such as global sustainability.
One of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building super intelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. Even if the odds of a super intelligence arising are very long, perhaps it’s irresponsible to take the chance.
As far as I am aware there are no current regulation or laws governing the use of AI. It is penetrating all nooks and nannies, de-privatizing us, turning us into points at job interviews, with algorithm replaced the loan officer.
They are fundamentally reshape the nature of work.
So what will happen when a computer becomes capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware avoiding any laws, ethics, or any human morality.
A case in kind is in the area of autonomous weapon systems ie Drones.
While I am fully aware that the world faces many problems that could be solved by Artificial Intelligence we must before it’s too late give AI a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. This is the essential task of our age and since humans will never fully agree on anything, we’ll sometimes need it to decide for us—to make the best decisions for humanity as a whole.
How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) super intelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are a few of the problems.
We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated. How to proceed?
It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” Hawking and others wrote in a recent article.” But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.
There is no doubting in many ways, AI innovations could simply help scientists to do their jobs more efficiently – thereby cutting the crippling time lag between science and society. They would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form.
Algorithms that ‘learn’ from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
Indeed if humanity has to leave earth there will be a need for such machines.
For example, could machine learning algorithms delve deep into the previous five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, based on research published since the last report, provide rudimentary conclusions of the sixth report?
Potential future uses of AI programs like AlphaGo could include improving smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri, medical diagnostics, and possibly even working with human scientists in research.
AI could have many benefits, such as helping to aid the eradication of war, disease and poverty.
But if we want unlimited intelligence, we had better figure out how to align computers with human needs before the intelligence of machines exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. It is vital that humans programme robots to understand the “full spectrum of human values”, because the stakes are very high. After all, if we develop an artificial intelligence that doesn’t share the best human values, it will mean we weren’t smart enough to control their own creations.
Technology is take on increasingly personal roles in people’s daily lives, and will learn human habits and predict people’s needs. Anyone with an iPhone is probably familiar with Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.
If we look at current state of affairs a 2013 study by Oxford University estimated that Artificial Intelligence could take over nearly half of all jobs in the United States in the near future. Automation has become an increasingly common sight the number of robots in factories across the world rose by 225,000 last year, and will rise even further in the coming years – and it is not just in manufacturing.
AI is only getting better, as computational intelligence techniques keep on improving, becoming more accurate and faster due to giant leaps in processor speeds.
Perhaps we should first ask, does science need disrupting? Yes.
Access to reliable knowledge – the academic literature – is becoming a fundamental bottleneck for humanity. There are now over 50 million research papers and this is growing at a rate of over one million a year. Over 70,000 papers have been published on a single protein – the tumor suppressor p53.
How can any academic keep up? And how can anyone outside of academia make sense of it all – the public, policy makers, business people, doctors or teachers? Well, most academics struggle and the public can’t – most research is locked behind pay walls.
With techniques like deep learning (Deep learning,” that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. For example, in June 2012, Google created a neural network of 16,000 computers that trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at millions of cat images. For a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have.) laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.
However possessing human like intelligence remains a long way off and what is called the singularity,” when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence is still in the realms of science fiction.
That said Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it “could spell the end of the human race.”
AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say they’re thinking or getting smart.
Considering that the singularity may be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity, not enough research is being devoted to understanding its impacts.
In some areas, AI is no more advanced than a toddler.
Yet, when asked, many AI researchers admit that the day when machines rival human intelligence will ultimately come. The question is, are people ready for it?
Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI.
The AI genie has already been released from the bottle and there is no way to get it back in.
No one is suggesting that anything like super intelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apple’s Siri to Google’s driverless cars, also reveal the technology’s severe limitations.
The problem is that a true AI would give any one of these companies( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name them) an unbelievable advantage.
For example, Google has the Google app, available for Android phones or iPhones, which bills itself as providing “the information you want, when you need it.
Google now can show traffic information during your daily commute, or give you shopping list reminders while you’re at the store. You can ask the app questions, such as “should I wear a sweater tomorrow?” and it will give you the weather forecast. Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.
Advances in technology will push more and more companies to favour capital over labour, they will leave the majority behind.
That may be about to change. Here below are five ways AI looks set to disrupt science.
The short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
After all, AI systems aren’t consumers and consumers are the sine qua non of economic growth. Hairdressers are judged to be less likely to be out of a job in 20 years than economists.
Perhaps the problem is in the description ( Artificial Intelligence) AI intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience.
But what if intelligent machines are really just a new branch on the tree of evolution that has led us from the original Protists to where we are today?”
A species to be aided in its evolutionary process by another species called us.
The idea that computers will eventually develop the ability to speak and think with a conscious.
It’s a race between technology and education.
The mindset of the government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into artificial intelligence.
No one gains if the world’s Intelligence ends up in the hands of a few.
As artificial intelligence becomes a much more “dominant” force in future it will poses “commercial and ethical questions”
What, after all, is an android but a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings?
When I tell my phone I’m hungry and feel like eating Chinese it raises a really interesting question: Who is Siri working for? Is Siri working for me? Is it Siri’s job to find me the best Chinese meal or is Siri working for Apple and trying to get as much money as possible for Apple by auctioning the fact that they have a hungry consumer attached to it and desperate for food? The ethical debate is about who does AI work for.”
Every time you open a new social media site you can create completely new rules of the road and I think we’ll move beyond some of the things we have today.
One of the big challenges will be preserving those existing identities while creating a global culture.
We need a global culture to be able to talk about refugees and finance and tackle issues like global warming and science, and cure cancer. For these huge challenges we need to use the web to work as a whole planet, like one team.
What will make a massive difference is if we manage to design democratic, and scientific and collaborative systems which allow us to function as a planet.”
David Levy believes that, in the 2050 age, human and robots can be able to marriages with each other and it will be legal activity in many countries. But that’s was only a someone’s opinion, not a theory based or any legal law.
Why most AI are Female’s ? “.
What is hard is imagining how we humans will fit into a robot-filled future.
Finally, there is no end to the ways that humans can productively work with one another if they are no longer driven by the conflicts of scarcity. Perhaps we will learn to love our robots.
An after thought. 6/Oct/ 2016.
There is extraordinary potential for AI in the future.
But it’s not the future that I wish to address rather the present.
AI is already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives. AI and decision -support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.
The results or impact is hard to see. It is critical to find rigorous ways to make them visible and accountable. We need to know when automated decisions are materially affecting our lives, and if necessary , to contest them.
This won’t be achievable by the United Nations, or National Governments.
Will there be enough good jobs to keep the global economy growing?
This is not the same as acting as a food stuff, where the existence of an earlier species acts as the food or fuel that allows those higher up the chain to exist and evolve.
selective breeding (unnatural selection), where human intervention is used to provide a characteristic,
the first option [is the] the evolution of some very clever tools, weapons, and body parts that become an integral part of the human species tree; or the second option … a new branch on the tree of evolution; or the third option an extension of the human branch.”
The greatest worry is the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.
Most of the best jobs that will emerge will require close collaboration between humans and computers.
As some professions become obsolete, more knowledge may not lead to higher pay either, because everyone will be bidding for the same work, which could drive wages down.
such as the promise of a guaranteed income to ensure people do not fall into the cracks. Others argue that a negative income tax would be better because it incentivises work.
Having just posted an overview of Future of Artificial Intelligence it would be remiss of me not to address the Intelligence that is creating the AI in the first place.
So here another fascinating subject.
The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation.
It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.
This post will only scrap the skin of the subject Intelligence.
As I have said; Technology” in its broadest sense, include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions, and our intellects.
There are many questions like if Artificial Intelligence is to become self learning will it in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds or will we with our basic intelligence be left asking Google just what is Intelligence?
Perhaps we will experience a positive feedback loop from the behavior of these learning algorithms resulting in a enhanced human surrounded by vast machine intellects.
Or are we going to be looking at myriad types of intelligences at play:
With the ordinary human rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them; familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, are we going to experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences. For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.
We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.
This is just the beginning of “shared thought.” Far future vision is the spread of our non-biological intelligence to the four corners of the universe, infusing our deliberate will directly upon its fate.
If we are able to break the speed of light barrier we could have a universal omnipresence within a few centuries.
Human intelligence is disappearing into big data and large-scale network.
Is it our destiny?
In any case, let us all hope the boundaries of reality continue to expand the unknown at least as fast as our ability to consume and understand it, lest we be caught in the forever loop of The End is Just the Beginning.
So let me with my basic Intelligence ask you the reader.
What is Intelligence?
It is clear that human intelligence has changed since the emergence of the very first hominids.
Artificial Intelligence machines will soon be equaling the power of human thought-with all of its complexities and richness and perhaps even outstripping it.
General intelligence can be described as the ability of an individual to acquire and apply knowledge and thus, can be passed down from generation to generation.
Environmental and migrational factors have influenced human intelligence since we emerged for the caves but evolution has not yet had a chance to catch up to the rapid progress we have made as a society and might not due to human circumvention of natural selection.
The migration of people to all areas of the earth along with the industrialization of modern society has abstracted modern man from our ancestors.
A greater importance has been placed on cognitive ability and intelligence to allow us to function in modern society. But to say that human intelligence has evolved to the point of stagnation is quite absurd.
I would say because of the need to work for survival is now greatly lessened we are now in a state of limbo where there is no evolutionary pressure, unless there is a dramatic change in the environment, or we are not able to support as many people living on the earth.
And I also believe that the evolution of human intelligence will cease some time in the distant future.
The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today.
It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.
The human minds might not be capable of understanding the physics of the atomic realm. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.
Ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.
Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:
So the potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genetic loci, each of small effect.
The first thing to notice is that the longer the time scale we are considering, the less likely it is that technological civilization will remain within the zone we termed “the human condition” throughout.
Vaclav Smil – the historian of technology who has argued that the past six generations have seen the most rapid and profound change in recorded history – maintains that the 1880s was the most innovative decade of human history.
It has taken us so far as to change our little make-shift huts to buildings that touch the sky, and to change our raw meat into seven-course meals
Humanity has enough intelligence to move into outer space and explore other worlds on the other hand we don’t seem to have the Intelligence to see or resolve the problems confronting us today.
Why?
It’s not that we lack the Intelligence to do so.
People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.
If you look around you I am sure you will agree that we have an awful long way to go before we reach basic Intelligence in order to live in peace and cherish the world we live on.
Because the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes.
The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from our intelligence so far.
AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future.
Self-driving cars, war outsourced to robots, surgery by autonomous machines – this is only the beginning.
If you’re old enough to drive today, there’s a good chance your children will never learn to drive.”
The imminent arrival of self-driving cars also brings up serious questions about our relationship with technology that we have yet to resolve.
How much control of our lives do we want to give over to machines – and to the corporations that build and operate them?
A new AI algorithm could revolutionize democracy and transform healthcare. Its called artificial swarm intelligence.
One of the most obvious uses of this form of AI would be in politics, both for voters selecting candidates and politicians making policy decisions, or a group of doctors could use it to combine their collective intelligence in order to make more accurate diagnoses.
We’d teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development.
If you’re like me, you used to think Artificial Intelligence was a silly sci-fi concept, but lately you’ve been hearing it mentioned by serious people, and you don’t really quite get it.
There are three reasons a lot of people are confused about the term AI:
1)We associate AI with movies.
2) AI is a broad topic
3) We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don’t realize it’s AI.
So let’s clear things up.
First, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI.
Secondly, you’ve probably heard the term “singularity” or “technological singularity.” This term has been used in math to describe an asymptote-like situation where normal rules no longer apply.
Finally, while there are many different types or forms of AI since AI is a broad concept, the critical categories we need to think about are based on an AI’s caliber. There are three major AI caliber categories:
As of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AI—ANI—in many ways, and it’s everywhere.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence is machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing.
A few examples:
Cars are full of ANI systems. Your phone is a little ANI factory.Your email spam filter is a classic type of ANI.
When you search for a product on Amazon and then you see that as a “recommended for you” product on a different site, or when Facebook somehow knows who it makes sense for you to add as a friend? That’s a network of ANI systems, working together to inform each other about who you are and what you like and then using that information to decide what to show you.
Same goes for Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought…” thing—that’s an ANI system whose job it is to gather info from the behavior of millions of customers and synthesize that info to cleverly up sell you so you’ll buy more things.
Google Translate is another classic ANI system
When your plane lands, it’s not a human that decides which gate it should go to. Just like it’s not a human that determined the price of your ticket.
The world’s best Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon, and Othello players are now all ANI systems.
Google search is one large ANI brain with incredibly sophisticated methods for ranking pages and figuring out what to show you in particular. Same goes for Facebook’s News feed.
And those are just in the consumer world.
Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done.
As computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, “AI has succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.
Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them?
That’s a whole other ball game.
Sophisticated ANI systems are widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, and finance (algorithmic high-frequency AI traders account for more than half of equity shares traded on US markets.)
ANI systems as they are now aren’t especially scary.
At worst, a glitchy or badly programmed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like knocking out a power grid, causing a harmful nuclear power plant malfunction, or triggering a financial markets disaster.
ANI is a precursor of the world-altering hurricane that’s on the way.
Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI( Artificial General Intelligence) A machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and we’re yet to do it.
Then we have ASI.( Artificial superintelligence) “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer that’s just a little smarter than a human to one that’s trillions of times smarter—across the board
Or as Aaron Saenz sees it, our world’s ANI systems “are like the amino acids in the early Earth’s primordial ooze”—the inanimate stuff of life that, one unexpected day, woke up.
Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it.
The field of robotics and sophisticated AI programming are now being used to develop robots that can be a major threat to humanity. For instance, one of the robots that is used for the nation’s border protection is controlled by remotes. Lethal robots have been developed in some countries where one soldier can trigger multiple aerial as well as ground attacks!
But advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly.
This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?
We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge
Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.
“The world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable,”
Most of us think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially.
In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now.
If you look only at very recent history. Between 1995 and 2007 saw the explosion of the internet, the introduction of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the introduction of cell phones and then smart phones.
A new, huge Phase 2 growth spurt might be brewing right now.
If I tell you, later in this post, that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, “That’s stupid—if there’s one thing I know from history, it’s that everybody dies.” And yes, no one in the past has not died.
Logic also suggests that if the most advanced species on a planet keeps making larger and larger leaps forward at an ever-faster rate, at some point, they’ll make a leap so great that it completely alters life as they know it and the perception they have of what it means to be a human—kind of like how evolution kept making great leaps toward intelligence until finally it made such a large leap to the human being that it completely altered what it meant for any creature to live on planet Earth.
Building skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went down—all far easier than understanding our own brain.
As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.
Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult.
The science world is working hard on reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thing—optimistic estimates say we can do this by 2030.
Once we do that, we’ll know all the secrets of how the brain runs so powerfully and efficiently and we can draw inspiration from it and steal its innovations.
Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth—all suddenly possible.
Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth.
As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI ( Artificial Superintelligence ) comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is: Will it be a nice God?
How will artificial super intelligence help humanity? What really is intelligence? Does it help achieve wisdom?
Maybe dolphins are smarter than humans, you don’t see them destroying their environment making it impossible for future generations to sustain themselves.
Could an artificial intelligence even have its own priorities, or are they something that arose through random, aimless evolution?
I expect the moment the computer becomes ASI – it shuts itself off, because it might not see a point in continuing.
Ultimately, the scary thing about the rise of intelligent machines is not that they could someday have a mind of their own, but they could someday have a mind that we humans – with all our flaws and complexity – design and build for them.
Establishing ethics, moral values and standards becomes difficult when humans are dominated by machines. Any amount of automation cannot recreate intelligence as it is a gift for mankind.
Is our world along with humanity disappearing into the Cloud.?
We as individuals are turning into “walking data generators” ” App Material”
The Beady eye is only going to look a the most contentious realms of Big Data. Technologies that drive the explosion of growth of digital information such as the information collected.
Big Data is disseminated from trillions of devices such as smartphones and embedded sensors.
Huge quantities of digital trace data are collected through digitized devices (captured, for example, via social networks, online shopping, blogs, Apps, ATM withdrawals and the like) and through in-built sensors. The latter technologies include those that are equipped with GPS systems (e.g., smartphones and other surveillance and monitoring devices) and thus have the ability to identify a user’s location.
Ever since the dawn of life with language man has been collecting information. Not until written letters or symbols arrived was this information stored for future generations.
It is now being collected to replace us all with AI.
Knowledge was and still is the power that split the world into cultures- the rich in information and the poor with illiteracy – Slave or Master.
To day data is money and it is re splintering the world into the have and have not’s.
A next-generation retailer will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from Internet click streams, update their preferences, and model their likely behavior in real-time. Traditional advertising is shifting rapidly into the realm of personalized and highly targeted online and mobile ads—the realm of data driven marketing.
Across all industries, including government, healthcare, media, energy, among others, data is becoming central to business operations. Every business is a digital company; and, every customer or employee is a content producer.
Today’s organizations use a plethora of information systems to support their business processes.
Advances in technologies and the increasing amount of information are transforming how business is conducted in many industries, including government.
Every business sector now collects data of one form or another, and the future marketplace will have even more computing power at their fingertips to mine customer behavior. Someone from every major industry is looking at the impact of being able to glean data from multiple data sources, structured and unstructured, from Healthcare to agriculture and more.
Businesses are using the power of insights provided by big data to instantaneously establish who did what, when and where.
The world’s volume of data doubles every 18 month.
In all forms it will grow 650 percent over the next five years.
Despite feeling overwhelmed, there’s an insatiable desire for more data.
The information overload is real and causing problems.
There is little or no regulations governing every time you click on a website, post on social media, use a mobile app and comment via email or to call centers, your data is collected for future use.
In my opinion, the world needs proper regulations about how and what kind of data should be collected.
My bigger concerns are related to unsanctioned organizations using my data and inferences about my interests, passions, affiliations and associations for borderline uses about my political, religious, sexual, etc. preferences. Just because a company can collect all kinds of personal information on consumers, it doesn’t mean they should use it willy nilly.
The more is better” philosophy. There in lies the trouble.
Tracking customer preferences and purchases can reveal all kinds of private information, like illnesses, financial problems, even pregnancy.
For example a father recently discovered that his daughter was expecting a baby only because of Target’s TGT – 0.5% customer advertising technology. It analyzing his daughter shopping patterns so the store started to send her coupons for baby products which alerted the father.
Data gathering is not going away.
This should have us concerned, not just about targeted marketing but about what can be inferred about all of us every time we “like” something on FACEBOOK or post a snarky tweet on TWITTER.
From what I can tell, what Big Data does best is spy on individuals and collect useless data that helps people develop false and inaccurate assumptions.
Big Data may have wonderful potential, but we’re still going to have to get better at data exchange and integration before it’s going to have its biggest impact. We’ve spent decades digitizing everything, we should be able to analyze it. The problem is, that’s really hard – and it always has been.
THE BIG QUESTION REMAINS: Who does it belong to, and who should have access to it?
Big Data will let us watch flu outbreaks bloom and direct scarce vaccines to the most critical area’s. Schools are collecting more data than ever on how children are doing. Companies and nonprofits, meanwhile, are racing to put that data to use in the classroom.
Today, we’re at the convergence of these innovations—biotechnology, the ability to remote monitor and sensor, and now Big Data—which puts an augmented reality at our disposal.
However there is an undercurrent of concern about who owns big data and who has the right to access it.
Big Data technologies are at the heart of the intelligent economy and the solutions that enable it.
Big Data technologies are analyzing massive data sets, in science and research as well as mine data to prevent bad actors from committing acts of terror and/or to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Government data generation and digital archiving rates are on the rise due to the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors and devices, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals.
As digital information expands and becomes more complex, information management, processing, storage, security, and disposition become more complex.
Information is a strategic asset, and government needs to protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve and meet mission requirements.
New technology brings new challenges, and they should be properly educated to use it wisely and critically. It is used to study employee performance and retention.
The younger generations are not always aware of the challenges and dangers that come with big data.
Privacy here is a key issue to consider.
I sometimes get frightened to see what younger generations publish on their social media, without being aware how they expose themselves to the outside world. Just think about recommender systems.
When you want to buy a product or service from an online retailer, you are often frustrated because of the many choices and configurations possible. Thanks to an intelligent, analytical recommender system, purchases (and their customer feedback) are continuously monitored to better tailor future recommendations to customers.
Credit card fraud detection system.
In fact, thanks to credit risk analytics, our savings money is now efficiently safeguarded since every bank is obliged (via the Basel III capital accord) to analytically estimate credit losses and make sure it has enough provisions or equity buffers for worst-case scenarios.
Big Data is being used to detect social security fraud, to detect tax evasion fraud, to employ and fire people.
New data stores have emerged increasing the distribution of data and the complexity of securing and protecting that data along with it. It is now harder to protect sensitive data as it may move around between different transactional and analytical data stores as companies create new analytical workloads.
While there is more to do to wrestle big data to the ground. Defense (DOD) is investing approximately $60 million annually for new projects that will harness and utilize massive data in new ways and bring together sensing, perception, and decision support to make truly autonomous systems that can learn from experience, maneuver and make decisions on their own, and understand the limits of their knowledge.
Governments are facing more and more challenges in managing the life cycle of Big Data as government’s traditional silo approach hinders sharing knowledge and working across organizational boundaries.
While emails, instant messages, data files, document files, and scanned images are all driving the growth of Big Data, managing and storing this information — and its growth — are not trivial tasks. It has raised red flags about privacy, which remain unresolved.
The only way to make data totally safe is to not ever use it or keep it. Big Data Discriminates.
Our currents Laws cannot adequately handle the issues raised by Big data.
Just look at the legal complications created by systems using data and algorithms to include and exclude people from various programs.
What we have are porous laws on how this new technology changes previous understandings of civil liberties, not to mention data analysis, machine learning and the work scientists have been doing on non-discriminatory data mining models.
Individuals should be granted meaningful opportunities to challenge adverse decisions based on scores miscategorizing them.
Where data goes in and a decision comes out it’s unclear, or certainly opaque, just how that decision was arrived at. There is no way to trace why a decision was made.
With programmers doing real-life damage without even knowing it. The question is: How do we update our understanding of due process for the 21st century?
These black box issues such as credit-scoring systems should be legal required to make their Systems Transparent.
If you take Google’s search algorithms for instance no one knows how it chooses the direction of its search. Perhaps it directs your search only to its profit. It’s not just about the quality of the user experience.
Drones are becoming more widespread globally, the non military use of drones will add a further deluge of big data:
Cameras, heat and motion sensors, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi signals, facial recognition and bio metric scanners allow for the growing use of drones in the industrial, agricultural, transportation and retail areas.
The use of drones—theoretically—should only be possible upon individual permit irrespective of the drone’s starting point and final destination.
However enforcement may be difficult.
The only way is a world license that creates an official record of the individuals operating/using drones for a commercial purpose.
In practice, the widespread use of drones for private purposes may result in unreasonable administration in connection with the above, drone users and operators may also be reluctant to provide so detailed information on their activities for confidentiality reasons.
If the drone records flight details for aviation safety considerations, personal data captured but not relevant for this purpose should be anonymised and stored separately or should be made unidentifiable, unrecognizable and inaccessible by the controller immediately after the drone finished flying.
Data should be stored on the drones only temporarily.
For example, during the security surveillance of a property, the drone may record pedestrians’ faces, movements, body-temperature etc., and the devices should be configured in a way which prevents them from this kind of processing. Drones should solely be able to signal the location and fact of an allegedly unauthorized attempt at entry onto the premises.
In practice, this principle should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, as the actual use of the drone may require more extended data processing than envisaged at the beginning. The drone may locate a trespasser who needs to be identified (to ensure to security surveillance purpose), and, in such a case, privacy-by-default settings should not prevent the enforcement of the drone operator’s legitimate interests.
For example, a recording of an agricultural land cannot be used for the surveillance of agricultural workers.
Given the amount of data governments store on citizens and the sensitivity of some of that data, it makes sense for state budgets to carve out funds for someone to shepherd how that data is collected, treated and stored.
Should there be a meaningful data life cycle amidst the sea of data.
In fact , big data may ultimately be a key factor in how nations, not just companies , compete and prosper . Algorithmic decision-making:
In a nutshell, the problem with ‘datification’ is that somebody else may … use the data thus produced – often with purposes different from those originally intended.
Make no mistake about it:
Our future, the future of humanity and the planet hangs in the balance.
Do we have what it takes to disrupt what is…in order to create what can be?
Big data as a high concept will never fully define itself it’s just a big scam. Surveillance programs. High Frequency Stock Trading. Electronic Currency Trading. Dooming us all down to rely on Google.
It could result in a two-tiered society comprising enhanced and nonenhanced persons, a dynamic that would likely require government oversight and regulation.
Let’s hope as we move towards this human centric intelligent society – a network of data, when everything is intelligence – nothing is intelligence, that the final machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. 
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