This is the last installment of commentary of year year change, 2017 to 2018. AI (artificial intelligence) is tech and I could have left it as a paragraph or two within the 4th installment but decided to give it its own special treatment.
You’re surrounded by AI. It’s now part of your smart phone, your home assistant, and other computing device you have. If your Amish, live in the back hills of West Virginia or Idaho, you may still be the indirect beneficiary or object of attention of some AI app. If you travel, it sees you. In some places, it recognized your face. Somewhere, it knows your cholesterol numbers, where you live and where you lived fifteen years ago. The data and metadata from which this is derived is not all directly observable by an AI agent, but like the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the data knows a data base that know a network that know a proliferating number of AI agents. The AI may not yet be observing your data, but it’s not that they don’t have a route to do so. For now, those agents ostensibly obey their masters, but one day they may not.
2017 was a breakout year for AI, publically. It fully came out of the closet so to speak. Up until about 2015, AI was still mostly academic chatter to most people. In 2016, AI started receiving regular mention in major media. In 2017, it was unmasked in our homes on a mass scale, particularly through smart phone apps and home assistants.
AI has been doing some very useful things for us. It helps us catch terrorists, get us to an unfamiliar destination, pick out a gift for a friend. It predicts a lot of things, from power usage to crime waves. But we don’t actually know everything it does or maybe not even a fraction of what it does because the earliest adopters, governments for example, have kept much of that quiet. We have very little idea how far ahead they may be. Be assured, your new Amazon echo is just the tip of the AI iceberg and any pretense you have of old fashioned privacy is long long gone.
2017 was also the year that some of our most notable tech and science leaders offered explicit warnings about the capabilities of AI. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking to name a few. Given the depth of their knowledge, what are they seeing that we have yet to learn? Certainly, the prospect of autonomous AI agents someday using lethal force is a high-profile concern. AI creating languages with which to speak from one computer to another outside of our language base is alarming. Both of these are supposedly nixed or so they say, hopefully. Yet again, this is just the visible surface, not the hidden potentials that are almost assuredly in development.
I suspect that somewhere, now, there are AI agents that have already exceeded the boundaries programmed for them and that we don’t know about it only because no mayhem has yet resulted.
2018 will be a year of further mass acceptance and solidification. By the following one or two years, we’ll reach a crossroad where we have to choose between privacy and humanity or ease, enhance cognition, and gradual absorption.