The Next Revolution is Here: AI is Already Changing the World
Whether it’s by making lectures accessible or by transforming the way we build apps – AI is changing the way we communicate.
The curse, “I hope you live in interesting times” is attributed (although, admittedly, without justification) to the Chinese. It refers to an idea that was extremely popular throughout most of human history: happy times are boring. The interesting times, historically at least, were those in which “something” happened. And that something? Well, it was usually not very positive for the people who lived through it. But, times have changed and living in interesting times is no longer an existential battle. For us, every few years, a new technological revolution occurs. And today, those interesting things make our lives a little more comfortable, while uncovering an entire world of possibility before us.
About 20 years ago, I experienced one of these revolutions when I traveled to the United States for several months, for work. One day, I was in Israel, where the internet culture and service possibilities were limited to mostly simple sites, And the next day, I was in San Francisco. Here, when looking for a movie theater, I turned to my computer screen. Not only did I find all the showtimes, but I could also order tickets with the click of a button. At that moment the realization hit me that, although I was at the other end of the planet, far from home, I was not alone; the world of information is at my fingertips. I understood that it would take time for this internet revolution to make it to every house and to every country, but it was coming.
Ten years later and it was Israel that was at the forefront of another revolution: the one in which we all became addicted to Waze. The Israeli navigation application, eventually sold to Google, was one of the first, and most outstanding, examples of the information sharing revolution. If internet users began as “consumers”, Waze and other applications like it turned us into members of a network that don’t only receive signals, but also send them, for the benefit of all users. With Waze, people send information regarding traffic and warnings about problems on the road, but there are many other examples that have appeared since of how users share information.
Today, it is clear that the next revolution is already here – the revolution of artificial intelligence – AI. We can’t always easily identify when artificial intelligence is responsible for what we are experiencing but when we take a peek under the hood of the technological experience engine, we more often than not discover a complicated algorithm.
Take for example, Microsoft’s recent Ignite Conference. A simultaneous transcript of the speaker’s talk was available at every speech at the conference. The speakers did not read their speeches or stick to a script. The transcript was made possible by an algorithm that understands natural language; it dissects each word that the speaker says and removes words like “emm, hmm, etc.”, to create an exact transcript of the talk.
These kinds of infrastructures have been available in American television broadcasts for years now. However, the real revolution is that this technology is now accessible to developers. Today, voice recognition, picture recognition and other complicated algorithms are much more accessible to application developers than in the past.
Only five years ago, a developer who wanted to dissect the contents of a picture would find it an incredibly complicated endeavor. Today, that same developer can go to a cloud service and receive the answer in seconds, along with the percentage of certainty of the results. Other people already went to the trouble of training the algorithm and building a model that knows how to identify details. And if there is no model? You can use a cloud service to create one very quickly using historical data.
When you give people the power to ask questions and get answers from the computer, they will find a million and one ways to use this ability. The simultaneous translation was far from the only example of the AI revolution at the Ignite Conference. One of the conference speeches, for example, exhibited how sophisticated algorithms and simple tools can grant the ability to identify items on store shelves. Store owners can automatically identify when an item is in the wrong place and can send a note to an employee who can then return the item to its rightful abode.
So why is the AI revolution happening now? Because the world is moving to the cloud. The more information we give the computer, the more it can learn and find better algorithms. But to accomplish this requires a great deal of computing power. Until not too long ago this amount of computing power was only available to large organizations. Today this computing power is a resource that cloud companies provide to us at a low cost.
And this is only the beginning. We are deep into the information and sharing revolution and we are still witnessing new sharing services being created each year that succeed in surprising us. Since the availability of AI is a development of the most recent years, we will soon begin to discover the most significant influences of this technology. Some of AI’s contributions are already in effect, however, but we aren’t aware of them.
As with the simultaneous translation at Microsoft’s conference, other applications use AI behind the scenes in order to assist the user. When you type into a chat on an internet site to receive service today, even if the application says “the representative is typing”, it is not likely that there is a human on the other side of the conversation; the typing line is meant to give users the impression that they are talking to a person and not to a machine.
Why would companies take the time to create this illusion? Many people feel that it is preferable to speak to a human representative. However, the truth is that robotic representatives today can understand many of our queries. The problem only begins when they don’t understand us; in this case, the fantasy is broken. A good chatbot, therefore, is one that can pass the conversation on to a real person behind the scenes, without anyone being the wiser. Some time, probably soon, there won’t be a need for this.
Who knows? Maybe it will be you that will make it possible for the bots to stop hiding. In the meantime, the one thing that is certain, is that it will be interesting.