Artificial intelligence - it will change everything. But artificial intelligence is not a new concept. In fact we've been writing about AI almost as long as stories have been written and we've been beguiled by novels, movies and TV series about it ever since.
We've seen it developed from Turing's simple predicting machine- to beating our best at chess and now deep learning programs that promise to eradicate disease, predict crime, solve world poverty, drive our cars, understand world economies and save our planet through climate change predictions. We're already using digital assistants that talk to us, developing robots that walk like us but what will happen when we develop systems that think like us or beyond human capacity. We're stood at the edge of the fourth Industrial Revolution and we need to shape our future carefully. So what do we need to know about AI?
There is not going to be anyone on the planet in the next 50 years who is going to be affected for better or worse by artificial intelligence in some way. There's not going to be anyone who isn't affected by some of the big challenges that we face like climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainability that artificial intelligence may help us to solve. Although the word itself wasn't actually coined until 1956 at Dartmouth, at the very famous conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning, in our cultural imaginations in the West it goes right back to Homer.
What's so intriguing is that there's a massive prehistory in literature and film in our cultural imagination which is arriving with this artificial intelligence technology and shaping the way people are thinking about it beyond the reality of what's actually happening. What's made it possible is the speeding up of computers the fact that number crunching is far faster now because of Moore's Law which makes computers get twice as fast every couple of years.
One of the really exciting things that's happened in AI and the reason it's been so revolutionary is that we have massive amounts of data for certain problems. So we have the whole internet worth of text to learn about languages, we have again the whole internet worth of images to learn about what images look like and these fields have progressed very quickly but that's hitting a limit. Many of the biggest challenges that we face in the coming century will involve making sense of huge amounts of information and complex interconnected systems, whether it's making sense of our genomes, phenomes, proteomes or all of the complicated systems that make up the ecosystem around us.
Human intelligence can make in-roads into this but human intelligence in combination with artificial intelligence allows a much more powerful ability to really understand these issues. In machine learning you give the computer lots of data and then the computer has an algorithm that finds patterns in data and also includes the performance of the computer at some task.
And that sort of key idea learning from data is really what's revolutionized AI in the last decade or so. We are using it in our mobile phones, we are using it with face recognition, we are using it in medicine, in law and so on so it's already part of our daily life there's nothing intrinsically magical about artificial intelligence. It's just very clever algorithms that are being executed in very clever ways. In some ways it's easier to imagine the potential downsides of AI than the upsides.
Now partly I think this is because we all know the Hollywood images of the machine intelligence breaking down our door and coming in with a machine gun, whereas the positive sides are being dreamt up by thousands of people all over the world, imaginative young people who see a problem and think about how they can solve it using AI, so it's really difficult to predict all of the countless ways in which it's going to make our lives better whether that's for example just recommending a new song you're going to like or curing us of cancer. But there is great public concern about the impacts of automation and robots on our jobs. Some pessimistic studies report that up to 40% of jobs could be lost to AI. With the first Industrial Revolution we mechanised much of human labour, we replaced human muscle power. What intelligent machines might do is also replace human brain power so it's natural that we're asking ourselves- well what will we do where machines can do everything better than we can? And at that point we might want to start asking is the paradigm of everybody working a nine-to-five job the one that we want to stay in long term.
I would ask the question are there things that we value in society at the moment that we currently don't build into our models of finance and economics? I think for this to happen obviously there's got to be massive redistribution of wealth otherwise the wealth earned by the computers is going to go to the huge companies or to the individuals who own them and have the skill. So I think we need massive socialist redistribution so to set up very large numbers of publicly funded and respected, dignified jobs as carers and other kinds of social work. Still we have to think about what that transition looks like.
We have to make sure that nobody is left behind so we have to think about the kind of skills we need and how to manage the disruption of people losing jobs and seeking new ones. History tells us that new jobs will be created that we can't even imagine yet. Imagine talking to your grandparents 50 years ago and telling them that the software engineer is going to be the job of the future. AI is developing against a backdrop of a world that is becoming increasingly digitised. While this brings great benefits there are concerns. Our infrastructure is becoming digital.
Our weapon systems, our scientific processes, artificial intelligence allows us to better make use of these systems and to optimize them. However, it means that new potential vulnerabilities will open up that may result in accidental problems but also present opportunities for hackers to manipulate or to attack systems. These are systems that we build to empower us to do amazing things. Now what can go wrong with these tools is that they might exacerbate inequality for example, you could cause geopolitical disruptions for example if AI is being used in warfare for lethal autonomous weapons and just generally changes to the way our society works, changes that are too sudden for example the changes in democracy. These things could cause unintended consequences. We've already seen in recent elections what can be done if you have enough data and access to people's minds through social media and AI is going to bring that to a wholly new level. Or for example we'll be able to use AI to disable critical systems like energy grids and food supply systems and so forth and at the same time it's a flipside of the benefits of AI the more we come to rely on it to run our transport systems or our health systems for example, the more vulnerable we become when those systems are attacked.
So preparing for an age of intelligent machines is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time? If you think about the world right now we have changed the world in a greater way than any species that has come before us both in positive ways and in negative ways and a very large part of that has been our intelligence. That's what allowed us to populate the entire planet, to change our environment, to build the machines that we have and if we are introducing entities that are able to match or even surpass our problem-solving and scientific capabilities, that's going to change the world even more than we have.
It can't simply be enough for the leading scientists as brilliant as they are to be pushing ahead as quickly as possible. We need there to be ongoing conversations and collaboration between the people who are thinking about the ethical impacts of the technology, how it's going to be deployed in different sectors, what portions the population are going to be affected in different ways, how we can make sure that the benefits of the technology reach as many people as possible. Our intelligence is central to being human so what will happen when we develop sentient AI that matches or surpasses human intelligence? Human capacities are of course a product of our very specific evolutionary history and of what you can fit inside one skull.
The machines we're building I think will be completely different, in a completely different history completely different constraints, so they're going to force us to really expand our idea of what intelligence is. If we develop general artificial intelligence I think all bets are off as to what it would mean to be human. It's an open question of what we even mean by general artificial intelligence. Broadly we use it to refer to intelligence that is not just narrowly defined to do a particular task very well but the intelligence that is able to go into a new environment, makes sense of it figure out what problems need to be solved and set about solving them. When we develop artificial intelligence systems, if we do, they're able to achieve this, I think it's fair to say we'll be introducing a new type of intelligence to the world and that that will change the world and our part in it in ways impossible to predict.
This is an incredibly exciting time to be alive. For millions of years, we humans have lived with other kinds of intelligence with birds all around us and animals and bacteria that all in their various ways manage to solve the problems of life. But now we are creating a wholly new form of intelligence and we don't know what that's going to be like, we don't know what life in the age of intelligent machines is going to be like but I'm really excited about the possibilities. There may be areas of scientific progress that are simply beyond us.
Whether it's new forms of physics, our deeper understanding of the universe or an understanding of our own biology and health that goes beyond what we can do without these tools. The idea that artificial intelligence can help us to understand ourselves and to understand the universe at a much deeper level than we'd ever would be able to do without it I think is about as far reaching a goal for artificial intelligence as could be. My special interest in space science and that's an arena where the robots clearly have an advantage because space is a hostile environment for people, it's very expensive to send people into space but I expect that we will have much more sophisticated robots, large flotillas of tiny machines exploring all the planets and the moons and also perhaps fabricators building huge structures up in space which are intelligent enough to do their work without human beings.
So I see space as being an arena for robots and miniaturised probes which can be far more effective than human beings. This is perhaps the most exciting time in the history of mankind. We're only a decade or so away from the future where we will be able to converse across multiple languages, where doctors will be able to diagnose better, where surgeons will be able to operate more accurately, where drivers will be able to drive more safely.
So I think in our research and in our work we should really embrace this technology and work together for the benefit of society. Although machines are threatening one aspect of what it means to be human at the same time they ought to help us appreciate the incredible machinery of the human brain and body and just how much of the millions of years of evolutionary history have gone into making us embodied creatures that can function in the world and just how impressive that is.
Please also check my previous posts regarding creating your cloud service like digital ocean or google cloud. Part 1 and Part-2 and Part-3 . Also most important listening your VMs on external IPs here -4
In Part-3 we have also seen how to install opennebula. Opennebula is an alternative to openstack/ cloudstack.
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