Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, inventor and now director of engineering at Google, who predicted, among other things, the rapid expansion of the Internet back in 1990. He then went on to popularize the concept of “the Singularity” New York Times Best Seller, an era in which humans will merge with artificial intelligence, transcend our biological limitations and, ultimately, achieve immortality. Whatever your views about Mr Kurzweil’s more advanced predictions - although obliged to point out that he has previously enjoyed an 86 percent accuracy rate - it certainly looks increasingly likely that some of those relating to the near future will be validated. This is because the basis for many of his theories lies in the exponential growth curve in computing power that we are witnessing right now. Just as one example, it’s nearly the time of year when we will find out about the latest performance of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The current front-runner is China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which has a High Performance Linpack (HPL) rating of 93.0 petaflops.
Discovering A Challenge to the Third Hoshi Shinichi Award from Proceedings of the INLG 2016 Workshop on Computational Creativity and Natural Language Generation in Edinburgh by Association for Computational Linguistics, we know the day a computer wrote a novel; The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans. In 1995, Peter Cochrane at the Time head of BT research demonstrated to a psychiatrist conference his laptop phoning a computer at home and having a limited conversation for a few minutes until they ran out of subjects to discuss. Twenty-One years later, we have still yet to prove his point that this technology will never get to the point where the voice tells me ‘I love you’ and we start to believe it. However, to move from a simplistic Q&A with your data to an engaging, intelligent conversation that uncovers drivers of business performance, it is necessary to power your bots and agents with Advanced Natural Language Generation .
Natural Language Generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers translate data into readable human languages. Advanced Natural Language Generation is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses advanced analytics to identify what’s important in data, then transforms those insights into Intelligent Narratives: automated, actionable, human-sounding stories at machine scale. Industry leaders join forces to demonstrate AI-powered conversational interface at the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit 2017, culminating that pairing Advanced Natural Language Generation with Business Intelligence creates endless possibilities for accessing actionable information anywhere, anytime.
Business People Need to Outsmart the Robot
You can’t stop the exponential growth of technology like artificial intelligence. You can’t outrun the future but the future can outrun you. In Eindhoven, we even found about an employment agency, masters in flexible automation, for artificial intelligence robots. With the contribution of artificial intelligence and cognitive capacities we are creating autonomous entities, like cars but also artificial intelligence robots for business. That makes it really interesting: autonomous business intelligence.
Related: Emerging Technology like Artificial Intelligence helps improve Business Intelligence
Artificial intelligence robots are going to take all our Jobs
What are floating point numbers? For anyone not familiar with the cute-sounding petaflop – or HPL ratings for that matter – it is equal to a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating-point, calculations per second. Also considering that, compare the Sunway TaihuLight’s performance with that of the former supercomputing champion, the Tianhe-2, which has an HPL rating of 33.8 petaflops. Now, that’s what we call a growth curve. Based on this, Mr Kurzweil’s proposal that by 2050, one thousand US dollars will buy a computer that has a billion times more intelligence than every human combined, doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
Because of the recent incredible advances in computing and other technologies, we have seen a resurgence of the old “man vs. machine” debate, which has tended to peak during our most intense phases of industrialization. And in turn, our newsfeeds have started to rumble with headlines claiming that artificial intelligence robots are going to take all of our jobs. Working side by side with a robot, having robot lift heavy equipment as required in manufacturing industry is fine but integration of a machine with a human would destroy our species as we know it, before we see the potential we hold within unfold. Nothing wrong with development of technology but one has to be very careful as to how it’s applied. Note, that exponential development of technology is also paralleled with exponential leap in awareness.
A Blockchain concept
Artificial intelligence robots is a new toy and it may be exciting to observe its development but be mindful – the toy is not as attractive as you think until we involve the natural language generation platforms within business intelligence parameters. While not denying that almost half of the activities that people are paid to do have the potential to be automated during the next few decades, they also argue that people will need to continue to work alongside their machine “colleagues”, and that where people are displaced by automation, they will find other employment as the nature of work changes. Combined with Blockchain, The Blockchain Intersection with Supply Chain Data, these artificial intelligence robots will have bank accounts etc. much like humans. New ecosystems, new infrastructure and new challenges which have to do with the balance between money, law, control and ethics. Interesting and much closer than most of us can imagine.
Mary Shelley’s movie ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ is a good example
The story of Chesley Sullenberger, an American pilot who became a hero after landing his damaged plane on the Hudson River in order to save the flight’s passengers and crew. What’s coming next is even more fascinating; however, because as we really start to embrace the power and potential of systems like artificial intelligence and virtual or augmented reality, the lines of distinction between the human and cyber worlds will start to blur – paving the way for the next phase of our evolution as digitally enhanced humans, or “Homo Digitalis”. We are close to a very hard decision: stay human or become machines? Something like cyborgs, much more than simply wearing exoskeleton suits.
Related: Business Intelligence involving Ethics and Maturity
