An interesting article on Medium, by Shubransh Rai titled, 'A Tech Tsunami Is Coming Very Soon...' caught my eye. It reminded me of an article I had written a few years back. When I wrote the article a few years ago on Blogspot, titled, 'Valves, Transistors, and Moore's Law – Have we reached Human Limits?' I was not trying to be prophetic, but then it appears that with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we might indeed have reached human limits!
While I don't desire to be a doomsday prophet, I do have a few concerns regarding the challenges that Artificial Intelligence might offer to us 'Human Beings'. Move away valves, transistors, and integrated chips, we are talking about moving beyond the hardware. We are talking about processing mind-boggling amounts of data (pun intended) and churning out interpretations, analyses, predictions, and premises that go beyond the computational skills of a grand Chessmaster.
Imagine pitting Artificial Intelligence against a Chessmaster, and having the game end in a few moves with the Grandchessmaster wearing a sheepish smile having lost a battle to a machine-based intelligence. Imagine being able to hack into the minds of your opponents, rivals, and enemies and outthinking them at their moves. Would you blame Artificial Intelligence for dealing with insider trading, doctoring the stock market, or even pre-empting a takeover? Talk about outsmarting the most 'intelligent' (pun and irony intended) creature on earth!
But all this computational ability is the result of having hardware capable of managing calculations and computations that go beyond the capabilities of valves, transistors, and integrated chips. In earlier times, we had floppy drives, CD-ROM disks, and hard disks that had limited capabilities for storing data, and our processors had limited capabilities. Today, we talk about data in terms of terabytes and teraflops.
Cloud computing and quantum computing have taken the lead, and the amount of data being stored and analyzed goes beyond the human brain's capabilities. This is where things become interesting, and in that case even scary. The world has seen how intelligence has become the new means of survival of the fittest. Evolution of life forms takes eons but the evolution of AI and AI-based computing is moving at a breathtaking pace! We, cannot, ever, think of upskilling and adapting to the pace with which technology and data processing are evolving.
In this competition between Human intelligence and Artificial intelligence, the former has already abdicated its centuries hold on dominance in intelligence. Prescience, sentience, emotional quotient, and awareness are soon going to be areas in which Artificial intelligence is going to gain lead. AI is already replacing copywriters, financial analysts, designers, coders, architects, climate analysts, the list is endless.
Disruption is a keyword and in these chaotic times, the emergence of Artificial intelligence coupled with technology has made things rather difficult for all human beings. Industry 4.0 also called as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or 4IR is a disruptive phase driven by Artificial Intelligence, data analytics, and human-machine interaction, including the introduction of robots, bots, and virtual technology. The accelerated rate at which technology is replacing older technology, the rise of innovations, and the rapid diffusion of all of them have caused an abrupt change in societies all over the world. Those who can adapt to the new technology survive but those who are not able to do so will have to concede defeat. What this means in terms of economic, cultural, and social impacts can be imagined even as we see a large number of layoffs by large corporations all over the world.
Last but not least, I would like to quote from my article published a few years back and the link of which I have shared below:
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated board will double every two years (approximately 18 months). This in itself points towards the doubling of processing power, doubling of memory space, and of course computing power. My first computer had a hard disk with a memory of 760 megabytes and today we are talking about terabytes! It is frightening, isn’t it? The information surfeit is so great that we can’t handle it, this is because as human beings we have limitations in filtering the amount of information that we can process. The result is a generation exposed to stress resulting from the daunting task of filtering and processing a large amount of data, most of which is of no use! While no doubt it took us human beings millennia to evolve, for transistors however this is not the case. While the computing power of computers and hand-held devices is doubling every two years, we however are not able to keep pace with the computers and mobile phones. The advent of artificial intelligence and electronic intelligence is a possibility that may soon become a reality.
https://rodrickwrites.blogspot.com/2017/02/iot-and-education-implications-for.html
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