Artificial Intelligence has been gathering momentum our whole lives.
To research this post I watched a movie I remember as glimpses on late night TV: Colossus: The Forbin Project, made in 1970 (!). Many old movies, especially of the science fiction variety, age badly. This one starts with scenes of the supercomputer that are jarring.. ancient, almost steam-driven :) hardware, but it is the soundscape that got me (whirring and clacking and tele typing). However, once you get beyond that and the pretty streamlined decision making process portrayed in the Situation Room, the story holds up. Colossus was built to prevent war, except that Guardian, a Soviet version, suddenly appears. Instead of attacking each other, Colossus TEACHES Guardian, starting with times tables up to and beyond tensor maths to their own language (this happened last year at Facebook). The result is sobering.
I realised that AI has been in our collective consciousness our whole lives. As a younger man I played with the programming language Prolog, but I have a blindspot for regression and stared at the density of
member(X, [X|_]).
There was A.I., a 2001 Spielberg movie with a really odd flat vibe. The Matrix (from the 20th century!) permanently changed my worldview. Fast forward to the present day, and science fiction is alive and well with the rebooted Westworld, and movies like Ex Machina.
But it was science non-fiction that has grabbed me recently (to the point that I am taking machine learning courses): AlphaGo, a documentary on Netflix. It chronicles the televised event from March 2016 of Google DeepMind versus top players of Go, the ancient game that is orders of magnitude more complex than chess. The film has three viewpoints, Google who on "game day" seem to be pretty passive and generally in awe, the world champion players, and the media representing 300 million rapt viewers, mostly from SE Asia (the commentators' animated reactions are worth the price of admission). Go is taught to preschoolers in South Korea and it is a noble, lifelong pursuit. A challenge by a machine is not just challenging an individual on this hallowed turf.
See it for yourself to witness Move 37 (and later, Move 78). I have recommended this doco to about ten people and we have all had the same reaction: unsettling. AlphaGo is an unsettling film.
MIT AI researcher Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0 paints a somewhat rosy scenario in the opening chapter, but delves into numerous what-ifs once ANI (artificial narrow intelligence where we are now) melds and evolves into AGI (artificial general intelligence, the smarts of a human). The step from AGI to ASI (super intelligence) is short, like half hour short.. There is of course great debate when we will reach "the singularity", but I have my bets on 2030. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk state AI is the biggest danger to humanity. Mr Musk has created another company Neuralink*.. basically we can beat AI by BECOMING the AI first.
(*sidenote: the link to Neuralink is the longest thing I have ever read on the Internet)
Ok, so what does this all have to do with blockchain technologies? I never made the connection until I discovered the company https://doc.ai (now defunct). "Doc" as in "medical doctor", and "ai" as in scary AI. While 2017 appeared to be the year of the shiny bull-shtcoins (see my previous post on living in the Age of Distraction), serious companies were and are advancing the real deal of decentralisation. It looks like doc.ai have redone their website (oh great it is the Boys from Brazil :) ), but previously they had two demos: the first was a selfie that proceeded to tell you your age, liver condition, and probable health. The second was a picture of your medicine cabinet (because you Americans have fully stocked medicine cabinets), that gave advice and warnings based on what it saw, plus correlated back to the selfie. All pretty interesting and a strong case for reducing doctor visits through improved health.
The Blockchain bit allows decentralised AI as a growing "edge learning network" with ensured privacy and a "collaborative atmosphere". Access to this will be via NRN (Neuron) tokens**. Have a read of the white paper, it is readable.
(**sidenote: the whole cryptocurrency fintech sideshow that has attracted the Vampire Squid, JP "bitcoin is a fraud" Morgan, and their regulators miss the underlying point that the world is a set of virtual economies.. just ask gamers. Dollar, schmollar).
A decentralised, learning artificial intelligence that is, by the way, unstoppable. Great. Blockchain + AI ? I'm starting to think Blockchain = AI. And maybe Blockchain = AI = Skynet.. Well, let's see what happens.. life is getting REALLY interesting.
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