Playing the Amateur Futurist: Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence

Over the past 20 years, humans have outsourced many of our tasks and responsibilities to devices, sometimes without even realising it. We hardly remember phone numbers, birthdays and scheduled events without our phones anymore. We are almost totally dependent on applications for navigating our way rather than printed maps. Right now, the AI-enabled x.ai personal assistant is much more efficient at scheduling tasks, meetings, etc.

Users of iPhones know Siri. There are also Alexa and Cortana for other operating systems. These artificial intelligence systems have been with us for a while now and, for advanced users of the respective devices, these systems have become dependable personal assistants. We ask them questions and we expect accurate answers immediately. However, this example of AI is about to become obsolete even before many people have learnt use them properly.

While Siri and Alexa require you to speak aloud to it, MIT has created a new device that can basically read your thoughts and whisper what you want to know in your ear: it is called the AlterEgo (see here). From the MIT Media Lab website:

“AlterEgo is a  non-invasive, wearable, peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistants, services, and other people without any voice—without opening their mouth, and without externally observable movement“—simply by articulating words internally.
The feedback to the user is given through audio, via bone conduction,  without disrupting the user's usual auditory perception, and making the interface closed-loop. This enables an human-computer interaction that is subjectively experienced as completely internal to the human user—like speaking to one's self.  AlterEgo seeks to combine humans and computers—such that computing, the Internet, and AI would weave into human personality as an internal “second self” and augment human cognition and abilities.”  

This is quite unlike the Google Glass smart glasses. The AlterEgo is worn behind the ear and along the jaw. Apparently, before we speak, we vocalise the words in our heads; the AlterEgo device reads the vocalisation without a person needing to actually speak. Because it’s not actually worn in the ear (which frees up the ear for real world sounds), it then communicates whatever we need to know by whispering the information into our heads through bone conduction. It gives users access to the entire Internet, right in their heads via silent two-way communication, privately, even in a crowd. Welcome to the world of Augmented Intelligence.

However, AI is also replacing humans in several roles, which brings up the spectre of humans competing with AI for jobs. Right now, AI is used extensively to analyse legal documents for risks and to predict legal outcomes, which contributes to decision-making on whether to settle a case or go to court. Deloitte predicts that 100,000 legal roles will be filled by AI by 2036.

Google's TensorFlow is one of the major breakthroughs in neural network applications which enable machine learning. We can envisage a future scenario where a phone is actually smarter than the user, as devices acquire independent ability to learn and improve their intelligence. When this is allied to observed improvements in robotics and 3D printing, there could possibly be a future where machines create better versions of themselves.

It is perfectly conceivable that the only way the human race will survive a world that is shared with autonomous artificial intelligence is through fusions of human and robot and augmented intelligence. Welcome, Mr and Mrs Terminator :)