Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of all our senses and activities
Thomas Frey //July 15, 2019//
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of all our senses and activities
Thomas Frey //July 15, 2019//
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not something that we can touch, feel, taste, swallow, or toss back and forth like a ball. At the same time, it will soon become part of every one of these senses and activities, and that kind of future is showing up at our doorsteps with increased regularity.
The rapid onset of AI means every new generation of people will participate in far more unique experiences than ever before.
Even as a futurist, I struggle with how parents should help focus the personal and professional pursuits of their children and what skills will be most beneficial.
Our most basic desires like health and happiness will likely have very different meanings in the years ahead. What if good health in the future requires genetically modifying our DNA and happiness means undergoing a simulation so transformative that virtually no one will ever have to experience sadness ever again? Will unknown forces in that same future create new forms of sadness to compensate?
We are the first generation in human history to agonize over the implications of children personifying robots and talking to machines. What if your child’s best friend is a robot? What if your kid and their robot buddy plan devious pranks together? What if they get into fights with other kids and their robots?
If you find this line of thinking alarming, you’re not alone.
As we find ourselves immersed in a world of change, our most ingenious innovators will be using AI and its seemingly unlimited toolsets to develop a new generation of entertainment. Our present forms of entertainment will pale in comparison. AI will infiltrate the entertainment industry and rewrite the rules for fame, engagement, accomplishment and, most importantly, our way of thinking about success.
With advances in image capture and manipulation, people no longer need to learn complex tools like Photoshop to enhance and alter their images. AI is already being used in every aspect of image augmentation to produce the best possible photo. However, the latest idea is using AI to generate images from scratch, and produce the entire composition synthetically.
While the toolsets of musicians will improve on every conceivable scale, the toolsets of listeners will expand at an even faster rate. Very little of today’s music industry will remain unchanged over the coming decades.
Most AI today is based on spotting patterns in large data sets. Because software is fast and never tires, AI has an edge over humans when it comes to most simple tasks. But it gets harder when it tries to make sense out feelings and emotions, and that’s what’s at the heart of most humor.
Even the best stand-up comedians will admit, there is no magic formula for producing the perfect joke. Much of what makes us laugh depends on subtle factors such as context, surprise, and body language. That said, future AI will eventually learn to reverse engineer humor in weird and unusual ways.
AI will also reinvent the way stories are created and told. Storytelling becomes far different when you switch from being a passive observer to an active participant, and the nature of your own engagement shifts from jealous observer to living your own “hero’s journey” on a daily basis.
We are quickly moving from making movies about AI, to using AI to help us make the movies. With filmmaking, 99% of the work today is very mundane. It involves going through hundreds of hours of video to find the best clips for a 2-second insert. AI will become a powerful tool for reducing the tedium of old-fashioned movie making and much more.
A great dining experience generally requires the human touch, but IBM’s AI-enabled Chef Watson offers a glimpse of how AI can become a sous-chef, of sorts, to help develop recipes and advise human chefs on food combinations and mixing techniques to create completely unique flavors.
We are on the verge of gamifying nearly every aspect of our lives including our employment, recreational activities, social interactions, education, entertainment, family life, and even our purpose in society.
Travel today is often a painful experience with the constant security checks, biometric scanners, passport controls and random bag searches. The sheer cost of these moments is far more than the momentary interactions with uniformed officials. They have a way of dampening our enthusiasm, squashing our sense of adventure and diminishing our willingness to explore and try new things.
Travel doesn’t have to be this painful, and AI will find a way to replace most of the grizzled looks and furrowed brows that line our cross-border entry points.
Until now, we’ve used technology to handle specific routine tasks. We hired engineers to break down complex processes into their component tasks, to develop automated processes. But AI is different. It has the ability to evaluate, select, act, and learn from its own actions.
When it comes to more complex problem solving, we used to think it would take computers decades or even centuries to catch up to the nimbleness of the human mind. But we underestimated the explosive nature of deep learning.
The concept of the technological singularity, the point where machines gain some level of superhuman intelligence and quickly outpace the human mind, is based on the notion that our own thinking can't evolve fast enough to keep up with technology. It also overlooks the potential for AI-assisted human intelligence to turbo-charge itself past any of today’s known boundaries.
The true limits of human performance have yet to be unleashed.
As humans, we are obsessed with trying new things, pushing the boundaries, and testing our limits just to make a difference.
In the end, everything AI does will have to fit into one of our human-centered value systems that take into account our personal desires, ambitions, and abilities.
We’re not about to give up our humanity just to let some machine decide whether or not an idea has value.
Indeed, it is in this context that we find ourselves coming up with groundbreaking new ideas like gravity boots, jazz music, graphic novels, self-driving cars, blockchain, machine learning, and artistic pyro techniques using fireworks that are dropped from drones and synced to the music.
We are just now getting a glimpse of the amazing future ahead, and it will be captivating, thrilling, shocking, and extraordinary all at the same time.