The Scary Part

A lot of our Intelligence is the result of our interaction with each other, and not just in response to our environment. Sharing our knowledge is hugely relevant to the development of AI. However, we humans don’t have the ‘bandwidth’ of communication needed to share knowledge at sufficient speed. And even if we could share all our knowledge, we don’t have the memory capacity to store it all in our brain. Enter machine intelligence.

Machine learning and AI became more mainstream in the late 1990s. Machines have played games since 1951, and today, they’re the world champion of every game they play: humans lost the top position in backgammon in 1992, in checkers in 1994, and in 1999, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov. Then — in 2016, we totally lost gaming to a Google-sub able to play Go (*): to win in Go, a computer needs intuition, it needs to think intelligently like a human, but be smarter.

Today, machines can hear, see, understand, speak, perform virtually every task — and their skill beats ours. The real breakthrough was when some taught the machines how to create, test and scale algorithms that are the foundation of other AI applications, and then others taught them how to code. The machines were becoming the creators‼️

AI — as a discipline, has started to accelerate massively, but all of this has only taken place in the last few years. The rate of progress is now moving at an exponential speed. Perhaps the most crucial question humanity has ever needed to ask is “Where will intelligence — specifically machine intelligence — take us from here?” From sci-fi to sci-fact, … way beyond our wildest dreams … .

The machines could now program their own children — other machines. There popped up forecasts that AI and machine learning had the potential to create an additional $2.5 trillion in value by 2026 in sales, and up to $2 trillion in manufacturing and supply chain planning: the Internet Bubble all over again … .

The popular narrative went as follows: “Smarter machines that could make better decisions could make a business billions of dollars richer. And businesses that didn’t have these machines by their side were gonna be wiped out.” There was simply nothing to prevent the first, greed-driven inevitable.

———————————

(*) Go is the most complex game on our planet. There are more possible moves on the Go board than there are atoms in the entire universe (…). In 2017, AlphaGo Master officially became the world champion.