Continuation, part 1 - Singularity? Prosperity? Agony?.
In our age of division of labor and atomization, few people understand what is really happening in the field of scientific and technological progress, automation and the labor market. Even fewer people imagine what will happen in these areas tomorrow, in a year. Meanwhile, revolutionary changes are brewing. The main theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year was "the fourth industrial revolution".
According to the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, revolutionary changes are associated with advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology and other areas of the cutting edge of science.
The development of artificial intelligence technologies is one of the main directions that large technology companies are working on, including Facebook, Google, IBM, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft.
According to official figures, Samsung Venture Investment has invested in seven startups working on AI technologies. They also include Mind Meld, Reactor Labs, Automated Insights and Maluuba. Taking into account unknown investments, the South Korean company has acquired more than 10 AI startups in the past five years.
At TED in Vancouver on February 17, 2016, Xprize founder Peter Diamandis and head of IBM Watson David Kenney talked about the $ 5 million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition for AI to make a compelling TED talk in 2020. The organizers of the competition hope to inspire developers to create technologies that can help people solve the world's most important problems.
According to research by CB Insights, the volume of investments in the development of AI technologies has grown sevenfold from $ 45 million in 2010 to $ 310 million in 2015. 2016 promises to be hot, because the numbers are growing by an order of magnitude. In the first months of February, we learned about billions of dollars in investments in the United States, and after AlphaGo won the ancient Go game, South Korea entered the game, allocating $ 830 million at the state level to the development of artificial intelligence. Why did the Koreans do this, you say? After all, no one started investing in AI after the victory of a machine over a human in chess? The answer is simple - it is impossible to calculate all variations of the moves in "Go", the only way to win is to use intuition and creative thinking. That is, exactly those properties of the human mind that many skeptics considered "inaccessible to the machine."
Capitalists do not invest billions of dollars in projects that have a payback period of more than 10 years. Artificial intelligence is already here, and we need to figure out how to live with it.
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Let's see together how similar systems are being used now and how they can be applied. Then it will be easier for us to make a forecast of the processes that will take place in society over the next 5-10 years.
The real revolution in the field of AI was made by convolutional neural networks. The dead-end approach to artificial intelligence that prevailed from the 1970s to the early 2000s, when researchers tried to create a coherent AI, is gradually becoming a thing of the past. Now the developers are focused on the implementation of individual intelligence functions. Convolutional neural networks learn everything separately. They can be used in practice today.
Convolutional neural networks can reveal market trends and tendencies on charts at a level inaccessible to humans, which will undoubtedly be in demand by capitalists.
According to existing stereotypes, a car and emotions are incompatible things. But is this the case for modern AI? Thanks to the synthesis of technologies of deep learning, machine vision and cognitive neuroscience, the American company Emotient has developed software training that scans the micro-expressions of facial muscles (for example, joy, anger, delight), assesses the degree of emotional response, attentiveness and involvement of the respondent. The new technology will eventually replace traditional market research methods: today, some advertising agencies have adopted it to assess the reactions of the target audience to a new content or product. “Emotions are at the heart of sales, but we've never been able to figure out exactly how people really feel,” says Emotient CEO Ken Denham.“Billions of dollars are spent annually on acquiring new customers. Companies and brands conduct research, try to understand their target audience, learn about their motives and consumer experience. However, the reality is that we are more likely to guess than we know for sure. That is, AI is already being actively used to analyze human emotions.
The strongest breakthrough was made by AI, even in creative tasks. For example, the computer program Neural Doodle can turn your selfie into a masterpiece by Renoir or Pablo Picasso. In early 2016, the book, written with the use of artificial intelligence, qualified for the final of the Japanese literary competition. The story, titled "The day the computer wrote a novel," was selected for the final of the competition. Hoshi Xingichi. Thus, we see that automation goes from factories to offices and into "creative tasks". This process is still poorly understood, few people talk about it. All because of the existing stereotype that AI is suitable for solving standard logical problems, and creativity is inherent only in humans. Most likely, very soon we will see that this is just another presumptuous delusion.
Previously, the task of recognizing visual information was very difficult for machines; humans were significantly superior to AI in this sense. Already, convolutional neural networks can determine what is shown in the picture, create a 3d model with video, and determine faces with 99% accuracy when sampling from more than a million photographs of different people. That is, in a sense, they see visual information like a person and even better than him, which was previously problematic.
Already technically ready and will soon enter the market, perhaps one of the most interesting functions of artificial intelligence based on convolutional neural networks. It is an understanding of natural language and the ability to communicate is indistinguishable from a person. This opens up the prospects for automating a huge army of office workers, call center operators, accountants, and lawyers.
This entire army of employees will be thrown into the collapsing job market soon. And earlier in the history of scientific and technological revolution, huge masses of people were thrown onto the market, but new jobs were immediately opened in connection with new industrial relations. But now is not the case. We are approaching the threshold when it will be possible to automate all processes. And labor, and management, and creativity.
How does the capitalist world respond to these challenges? What is the answer to the left movement? Let's discuss this together and suggest solutions in the next article.