What will happen when we’ve built machines as intelligent as us? According to the experts this incredible feat will be achieved in the year 2062 – a mere 44 years away – which certainly begs the question: what will the world, our jobs, the economy, politics, war, and everyday life and death, look like then?
Fortunately, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at UNSW has done the research for us.
Currently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly helped launch the magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, TIME, and more, and is the bestselling author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. He recently sat down with Srinivas Rao on the Unmistakable Creative podcast to discuss the surprising changes that society can expect in the next 20 years.
A new generation of celebrities is selling out concerts, starring in commercials, and amassing huge Instagram followings. But none of them exist—corporeally, anyway. In recent years, and starting in Japan, technology and social media have spawned a digital demimonde of computer-generated stars, ranging from fake musicians and models to company mascots who appear as holograms (like Betty Crocker, with AI). When they’re not entertaining you, they’re trying to convince you of their humanity, and even the more cartoonish among them have fleshed-out personalities. In a way, it’s the purest expression of celebrity, which has always been an elaborate illusion. CGI starlets, though, “are much easier to control,” says Ryan Detert, CEO of the branding firm Influential. Except when they misbehave.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) announced that InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts has collaborated with Baidu to introduce the next generation of intelligent hospitality – smart rooms, which are powered by artificial intelligence.
From now on, guests staying at InterContinental® Beijing Sanlitun and InterContinental® Guangzhou Exhibition Centre will be among the first to enjoy the AI smart rooms. A total of 100 AI powered Club InterContinental suites will be available at InterContinental hotels in gateway cities and key destinations across China within the year.
If you believe the hype, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to change the world in dramatic ways soon. Nay-sayers claim it will lead to, at best, rising unemployment and civil unrest, and at worst, the eradication of humanity. Advocates, on the other hand, are telling us to look forward to a future of leisure and creativity as robots take care of the drudgery and routine.
A third camp – probably the largest – are happy to admit that the forces of change which are at work are too complicated to predict and, for the moment, everything is up in the air. Previous large-scale changes to the way we work (past industrial revolutions) may have been disruptive in the short-term. However, in the long term what happened was a transfer of labor from countryside to cities, and no lasting downfall of society.
However, as author Calum Chace points out in his latest book ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities’ this time there’s one big difference. Previous industrial revolutions involved replacing human mechanical skills with tools and machinery. This time it’s our mental functions which are being replaced – particularly our ability to make predictions and decisions. This is something which has never happened before in human history, and no one exactly knows what to expect.
The sensationalist hype around AI has a lot of people believing that the technology may be too advanced or too technical for their businesses to take advantage of. This is false. AI is here now and you can start using it today.
Wireless radio signals can be used to monitor a person’s precise movements through a solid wall, thanks to artificial intelligence. The technology could help us monitor people for health and safety less intrusively—but it also raises a range of security and privacy issues.
JD.com, one of China’s big e-commerce companies, has unveiled a warehouse in Shanghai that, it says, only keeps humans on board so they can service all the robots.
The Crisis Text Line uses machine learning to figure out who’s at risk and when to intervene.
When horrible news — like the deaths by suicide of chef, author, and TV star Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade, or the 2015 Paris attacks — breaks, crisis counseling services often get deluged with calls from people in despair. Deciding whom to help first can be a life-or-death decision.
Sotheby’s acquired startup Thread Genius, whose machine learning tech can discern clients’ artistic and style leanings–and suggest customized purchases.
Just a few doors down from its CEO and the wood-paneled cubicles where sharply dressed professionals sit, the eighth floor of Sotheby’s New York takes on a very different vibe.
Suddenly, it’s more Silicon Valley than Upper East Side as staid formality gives way to a group of millennials, some in T-shirts with their sneakered feet on desks. Computer code is scrawled on whiteboards and the room’s glass wall. It is here where the storied auction house–founded in 1744–meets its future.
I’m not kicking our smart speaker out of the house just yet, but the consequences of having it in my family’s life are becoming clear.
Since last year I’ve had a smart speaker in my living room—an Echo Dot. My family uses it mostly to ask Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa, to play music. But after I saw a report that an Alexa-enabled speaker owned by a family in Portland, Oregon, had recorded a conversation and sent it to a contact, I started wondering: what is it picking up on at my house when we’re not talking to it directly?
