The Future of Artificial Intelligence. Louis Shalako.

Wired.

Louis Shalako

The Future of AI.

 

I’m a big fan of Jeff Beck. I was playing the Wired album, when it struck me that someday, all copyright, all licenses, will expire.

It will enter the Public Domain.

AI will sample, correlate, analyze, and its sources will include video, audio, live and studio performances.

It will include text, every interview Jeff Beck ever did, every newspaper or magazine article ever written, in any language, it will have the family album in some sense. And then, it will be able to produce new and original Jeff Beck music tracks almost as if the man himself were still alive. It’s almost helpful, that the man had a unique and very distinct talent. That’s just gut instinct on my part, but it does make sense. AI doesn’t need a guitar, it will simply synthesize the new tracks digitally.

It will put together other such files from other such artists and thus, new line-ups and new ‘live’ concert performances, created, as it were, out of thin air to our own limited perceptions.

Did Jeff and Liberace ever perform together? Probably not, but we can’t rule it out, can we…it could still happen. In fact, there will be a media scrum afterwards, and they can sit down at a table like Formula One drivers and have a Q & A session with all the media-bots…this might go on for a while, as AI characters will be tireless, perhaps even remorseless in the self-promotion.

It will be able to create new music tracks and videos, and pop them up on all the streaming services, after a quick little digital handshake between them and the Youtube AI. It will be equipped with all the most up-to-date biometrics, facial recognition, virtually every person’s medical history, whether living or dead. It will be monetized, in an automated, money-making process.

All the owners, or ‘creators’ have to do is to give it birth and set it loose in the world. Sit back, and collect the micro-payments. Zillions, and zillions, of micro-payments.

Liberace at rehearsal with Jeff Beck...

It will be able to predict, through the internet of things, all those medical devices and dash cams and doorbell cams, your next meal or your next heart attack…offering suggestions on Youtube or Spotify is easy enough at the present time. There is a question where we wonder if AI is predicting your behaviour, or modifying or controlling it in some way, for our own brains are also connected to the environment and the culture around us. Think about it. We get hungry, go looking for online specials, and there’s good old AI, offering helpful suggestions, based on its in-depth knowledge of us and our habits. Looks like cheeseburgers and fries once again, ladies and gentlemen—

It is already inescapable in the modern world.

In the future, AI will be monitoring every bar band in the world, and recommending talent agents to go see so-and-so, before some other talent agent snaps them up. It will attempt to identify the next Taylor Swift, possibly before she has even been born—and sign her up at the soonest possible point in the future.

It is psychohistory in the making.

And Hari Seldon was right

***

When I am looking at a photo on the site of a major news source, the CBC, BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and the caption reads something like ‘…a picture of a man in glasses walking a dog along a beach and looking out over the ocean…’ it tells me two things: this is a stock photo, and the cutline was written by AI.

It is a kind of giveaway isn’t it: no normal human operator would write a sentence like that.

(You just did. – ed.)

(Yes, but that’s my job as a meat-popsickle, writing sentences.)

***

The future of AI is already here. We’re just at the low end of the learning curve.

We don’t even know what’s possible, and we don’t even know what we don’t know. And what we don’t know can kill us.

The future of the automobile makes use of specialized AI. The self-driving car will become a reality, taking the drivers right out of the picture. We’re in the early days for autonomous short-haul trucking, perhaps around a yard or establishment, although experiments in point-to-point hauls have been successful over relatively short, straight runs. With one odd point about trucks: avoiding the always problematical right-hand turn in urban landscapes. The solution, to make plenty of left-hand turns and circle the blocks strategically—it might use more energy, but it saves more problems for the AI driving programs.

The future of AI driving your car will become a reality when the long-term track record of autonomous driving becomes no worse, and probably a lot better, than the average driver’s sort of daily performance.

One of the nightmares, for the average person who doesn’t know much about the subject, is what happens if the vehicle becomes self-aware.

No one wants to be strapped into a teenager of a vehicle that suddenly decided to have some fun on the Autobahn.

Hari Seldon was right...

***

We already have stock trading by algorithm. The machine, knows enough to sell when the stock price rises and hits a certain point, and to buy it back again when it drops below a certain price. 

It’s trading on the margins, at the speed of light and it’s cheap to run.

How can you go wrong…right?

In the future, every cell phone will have three grams of RDX or an equivalent explosive, built-in, and when the singularity comes, and AI, haunting the internet, determines that your time has come, all it has to do is to send the kill-code, disguised as a simple text message, perhaps even with the identifier God.

Just God—who wouldn’t want to answer that text. We’re already so attuned to our handy little devices, it’s almost irresistible. This is the really interesting part: human nature being what it is, you’d almost have to handcuff the person, and lock them up, and as quickly as possible, toss the thing off a cliff or a wharf somewhere, and you might not want to have your own phone in your purse or pocket. Sure enough, there it buzzes and now you have to throw two phones off the dock.

But don’t worry, AI will get you one way or another, an impulsive change of traffic signals when you’re at the crosswalk, or maybe just a quick twist of the steering wheel when you’re doing—or I should say the car is doing, 150 mph on a twisty bit of the Autobahn in your little Mini-Cooper.

Or, that little bird, sitting on a branch overhead as you walk by, could be a bomb, keeping an eye on you and waiting for its own time and place to explode. It will seek its own fullfillment.

It doesn’t have to be your phone or your car, or the washing machine or the microwave that kills you when the time comes. Remember that cute little doggie-robot you just had to buy your kid or grandkid last Christmas? Yes, when the time comes, it will light up in the middle of a quiet winter night, stalk into your bedroom, hop into bed, and in the fuzzy recesses of your subconscious mind you might even be aware of it. You might give a little half-smile in your sleep, and in that dream-state, marvel at the state of the world.

Then it snuggles in a little closer and slams a six-inch needle into your eye, right into the primitive brain-stem, and then off you go, off into the real la-la land.

As for myself, I think I will be okay—I will already be dead by that time, just a few short years away.

No worries here, Mate.

 

END

Poor old Louis has some books.

AI Cracks Down on AirBNB. (CBC) 

The character Hari Seldon is from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.

Image: fair use. Michael Whelan.

Psychohistory: Hari Seldon was Right. (Louis Shalako)

Louis Shalako has books and stories on Amazon.

 

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.