In 5 years, we’ll only care about 3 software updates
September 2007 was a seminal moment in human evolution. Right up there with the introduction of rice cultivation, magnetic compass, wheel & axle, the internet, is… iPhone. Each of these innovation reshaped the way people interact and expanded the accessible world. Within 5 years, we will experience another worldchanging technology, artificial general intelligence.
Artificial General Intelligence basically means “thinking machines” able to learn to do any intellectual task instead of being limited to specific domains.
Conversations are taking place about the nature and potential byproducts of AGI. These are largely moot! Imagine conversations around food security just before the invention of farmed rice. What do you think would make the list of “common concerns” for people prior to the invention of the wheel & axel. How about after? Technology lives in Pandora’s boudoir. The AGI drawer is already open.
September is Apple Christmas for most Apple patrons. The promise of new features puts a smile on my face. I will always remember updating my first iPhone to iPhone OS 3 cemented my loyalty. iOS continues to reward customers with free updates, optimizations, and an exploding list of special powers. Within the next 5 years, the list will narrow. Most companies, including Apple, will focus their engineering and design resources around updating three key features. AI. Voice. Security.
Intelligence: Inclusion
Our photos are scanned, tagged, and highlighted. Our cameras locate subjects, predicates, and objects wiggling in frame. Our email clients predict what we won’t want to read right away. The feature runway for consumer-facing Artificial Intelligence begins with productivity mirroring the early development of personal computers. Hold “personal” in mind for a bit.
Entry-level coders can pan the internet for our information like a 49er. How many coders can surface suggestions based on an understanding of our personal habits? AI has matured past recognizing people. Developers are currently racing to understand us.
CODE
The more assimilated a person is within a recognizable culture, the easier it will be to prescribe actions for them. “Places you will like” are “places you should like”. What do cis-hetero-early-30something-American-white-semi-religious-etc-etc-etc like to do on the weekend? What rings laughter? What triggers insecurity?
Intelligence that shifts from assistant to guru is inevitable as systems become more adept at personalization. The offspring of a billion data points from one person indexed against quadrillions of data points from currently networked humanity. The relationship people form with their personal assistants will lend the strongest incentive for people to become platform loyal. Living untethered or “off the grid” will take on a new dimension.
SAMPLE
Your photos will be curated and edited to your demonstrated preferences. A select assortment of picture frames is waiting in your shopping cart. You buy them and let your GURU decorate your home with locations you visited, works from your favorite artists, family photos to remind you of upcoming birthdays, and images of you and your dinner guests. Grant permission and your GURU will shop for you with setting based on what you can afford.
Integrations, integrations, integrations. Cities, business, homes, individuals will deploy an ever expanding array of sensors forming mesh of ambient computing. Including your information, your AI, and yourself into this network creates a relationship instantly enhances the experiences available to you and everyone else. Inclusion is the name of the game. The better the AI understands who you are, the better it can intuit your wants and needs, solving problems before they arise. The more access you grant AI into your life.
Personalized artificial intelligence means ambient assistance.
SAMPLE
With HIPPA consent, your AI can access your medical records and biometric readings. Combined with location data, your assistant can recognize and forecast behavior trends and shifts in mood. Add a subscriptions and your AI could go further by actively checking in with you, ask you questions, and inquire directly into your well-being. Not so responsive to direct inquiry? Tweak a setting and your AI can feed you more subtle interactions designed to check in on your status. These interactions can curated via online therapy service provider operating in the background. AI can provide micro-therapy.
Voice: Hello, I’m here.
The most striking moment of entire movie, “Her”, is the moment we first hear Samantha speak. A thinking, feeling, breathing robot? Developers and researchers can tell us what elements of the human voice communicate humanity. Samantha’s voice carries the dream that one day, they will code those details into our devices. In the movie, the leap in voice quality from pre-installation guide to Samantha is GARGANTUAN! It’s the difference between being “on” and being “alive”. We all succumb to the illusion that machines can live when a human-sounding voice says, “hello.”
Along with the way AI sounds, its capacity to succeed at 99.9% of interactions is important. Beyond successfully handling ad-libbed commands and multi-domain queries is a beginning. There are several markers signaling what a person means beyond the words they employ. I’d wager, AI gets even better results when we look into a device’s camera, allowing it to read facial cues. AgUI will be key. These cues, this level of sensitivity grants AI a key lever in ensuring we take real, desired action.
SAMPLE I have a meeting at 3pm. My AI will remind me. But how? How do I feel about these meetings, those folks, this project? How has my day gone up to this point? Does the leader of the meeting know? Have I granted my leaders team insight -AI generated mood/productivity kibble. Remember our bit about inclusion? Consider: how much of this information about ourselves do we want other people to have? Would it be beneficial for my lead, team-mate, partner, friend to know what kind of day I am having. What kinds of emotions I’m likely feeling?
Security: Who Are You?
Biometric Authentication will continue to evolve. Personalized Artificial General Intelligence Biometric Authentication (PAGIBA for short?) will become more sophisticated too. How far down the rabbit hole goes is beyond me, but enterprising companies will happily charge a fare. Beyond direct authentication, security features will integrate to scramble breadcrumbs left throughout the web and world. Facial recognition via CCTV is quickly ushering an era of mass surveillance. Privacy becomes currency.
SAMPLE Like an express metro pass, access will become buying. Migrating keys and cards to our wearable devices is a start. However, in societies with ubiquitous CCTV, you will be your own walking talking biometric passcode. You may choose to increase security beyond facial recognition to dhn dhn dna verification. What will we want to secure in the future?
Challenge
AGI could overwhelm infrastructure, networks, or society. It disrupts decision-making by artifical logic. Outside of food and water security, a greater threat to society is our impressionable nature. Millions of us already choose to live much of their lives in virtual reality. Fewer people know their neighbors and even fewer would recognize human beings living 10, 100, 1000 miles away as neighbors. With the majority of our peer interaction happening via digital platforms, we could very easily wake up into a Post-Orwelian world where divination is required to distinguish reality from engineering.
