In this week’s brew:
A Glimpse in to the Future by Neelendra Nath
Visual Thought of the Week featuring creative by @visualizevalue
Discussion around Sentient AI - a twitter thread by Giada Pistilli
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A Glimpse in to the Future
It is a perilous task to predict the future. There are innumerable ways to be wrong and only one to be correct. Yet, speculating the future is the first step towards creating things that doesn’t exist.
Technology has taken great leaps in the last couple of decades. But, the foundation of everything amazing and almost ‘miraculous’ that we take for granted today has been laid more centuries ago. The earliest scientific development of wireless communication would go back to late nineteenth century, but in human imagination it has existed for millennia. Thus, it can be a good exercise to let your mind go on a wild goose chase every nor or then. Worst case, you will be a goose short.
Over last couple of years, I have made it a practice to maintain a list of technology that I believe will become commonplace in my lifetime. It is part wishful thinking, and part extrapolation of existing technology. I can be massively off on a few things, and some of the technology might not even exist yet. But we definitely are moving in that direction.
Universal Automation
This is the lowest hanging fruit. We are already deep into it for workspace assistance, technology development etc. My proposition is memoized cronjobs will become available as a service for everyone for pretty much everything which is mundane and repetitive. Voice assistants like Alexa, Siri or Google Home are continually moving in that direction.
I believe soon we will just be performing a trigger action or set objectives and from there on automation will follow through on associated processes. This can be done for everything that we do in life, whether it is daily activities or life decisions. Take an example of daily routine activity you might follow when you get back home from work. As you start from work for home, a sequence of heating your coffee, preparing your bath, warming your food etc can be set in motion. Similarly for life decisions, as you select a learning objective, it will triggers a sequence to select the right tutorials or academic institutions, prepare the schedule, seek appointment with the right people to learn from or process admission application of universities, summarizes books and articles, evaluate the career prospects that open up once objective is met and accordingly apply for those roles as you progress through your learning based on your performance. A similar sequence can be triggered when you set a relationship objective or even a holiday. The idea is you will just take decisions, and never have to go through the process of planning.
Embeddables & LifeOS
Devices are an inseparable part of our lives. So much so that they are now object of addiction and abuse. Yet, we do not seem to get enough of it. Wearables are commonplace enough and growing continually. Embedded device is well out of its testing and beta phase. Rumours were apace during Covid-19 about vaccine having nanodevices. While they were baseless and unfounded, the fundamental idea is not ridiculous. In fact, embedded device in healthcare has a been a reality for long. Think stents, pacemakers etc. It is just that so far, they had not been connected.
The popular culture has effectively normalized the idea of half human, half machine. And, truth to be told we are already some sort of Cyborg with wearables and hand held devices almost an extension of ourselves. So, embeddables will not come as a surprise. It is, in fact, the next obvious step.
The point here is, how soon and how far can we go with it? I believe, we will soon be able to turn thoughts in to commands, reinforce skeletal structure and use our own biological hardware – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, limbs – instead of external devices to perform tasks. A common operating system – LifeOS – will run our bodies and all the external machines. It will also enable us to effectively stay connected to every other living being. A convergence to singularity.
Sentient AI Companion
Last week much got written about the sentience of LaMDA. Google sent its engineer Blake Lemoine who claimed that, on forced leave and completely rejected his assertions. I am, to be honest, also highly sceptical about the sentience of AI, though do not completely rule out the possibility. But one thing that I believe in with full certainty is the ability of artificial intelligence to pretend to be sentient. One can argue, as far as interactions among human are concerned, pretence is probably the most exercised token.
AI is our companion in much part of our life, as we are dealing with chatbots to accomplish many tasks. But I imagine of a near future, where we will have personal companions – friends & family – who will be AI, if not sentient then at least pretending to be. Enhanced graphic capabilities and true AR can bring metaverse to life, where an AI can get its form – human, humanoid or animal – whatever we fancy. It will be completely capable of having conversation which would make anyone believe that they are real human being. I mean, it has made a Google engineer working on AI believe that. And then between audio-visual stimulation and embeddables running on LifeOS, we will be able to make those experience quite a livid memory to the extent to trigger emotional and involuntary bodily responses.
Space Logistics
Ordering online although seems a very trivial action to most of us, the eCommerce has been the mover of many technological development that we have come across in the last couple of decades. We do not appreciate it much, but logistics sits at the core of the global civilization that we have developed in to. Be it war or trade, both method of expansion was enabled by our ability to move huge amount of supplies from one place to another. It is a process which have been refined since the dawn of the civilization. Arrival of eCommerce put it on steroid.
Awareness generates demand. We are now in an age where consumer expects that products from any corner of the world should be available to them for minimal or no additional price burden. The investment in improving end to end logistics is huge. Amazon alone have spent billions of dollars in developing every aspect of logistics including warehousing technology, freight fleet build up, process optimization, last mile etc.
A few recent developments make me believe that we might very soon move logistics operations to the space. They are advanced drones, reusable rockets and Elon Musk’s mission to become interplanetary species. While consumer need on Earth might not be able to justify the cost of developing technology for space logistics, the mission to populate Mars will. For his mission to build civilization on Mars, Elon will have to move a lot of material from Earth to Mars for an extended period of time. It would make sense to have series of warehouses and delivery system between the two planet. Like it often happens, the consumer technology will piggyback on space technology. Between our air space and lower earth orbit, the vast space – stratosphere is largely unutilized. We may be able to build super warehouses is this space and then floating delivery balloons ready to ship out consignments using drones closer to earth.
I have other things on my list which I believe will happen sooner than later, and also of intriguing complexities that would come with that. For example, if and when Elon Musk does set out to establish civilization on Mars, will it be completely populated by transfer of people, animals and plants from Earth, or will we be artificially creating some on Mars itself? If we do create, will we produce them in our image, a final product or will we just spring out single cell life and let it evolve on its own?
Between converging in to a singularity with embeddables and creating new life on a new planet, how far are we from being the Gods, the ancient theologies told us the stories of?
WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Visual Thought of the Week
A Twitter thread on Sentient AI by Giada Pistilli
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A Glimpse in to the Future