DRAFT PAPER

Your Value after the A.I. Singularity Event

Uki D. Lucas May 20, 2017

#byUkiDLucas #SingularityEvent #EQ #Cybernetics #AI #public

An Overview

In this article, we will explore the development of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and its impact on humanity.

The Audio Recording for This Article

The author is not a native English speaker and appropriately, he has decided to delegate the audio recording of this article to the A.I. assistant.

The Definition of Singularity

The singularity event will occur when the computer Intelligence will reach the level of an average human intelligence and gain the ability to learn new skills that it has not been trained for. Then, the computer will be able to run the endless „thought experiments” that might result in very unpredictable results.

We have only a few years to prepare for it.

The Artificial Intelligence Will be a Distributed System

Most of the people imagine A.I. as robot, depending on the personal outlook either as the Bicentenial Man, the ExMachina, or the Terminator.

I believe that the Singularity event will not originat from a single computer system, but rather it will be an artifact of a widely distributed system tapping to thousands of very specialized machine learning models hosted by Google, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, IBM Watson and thousands other data centers, all of which will be written by different developers. The Artificial Intelligence might be very fast, or most likely, at first, it might be glacial, coming with the „right solution” over weeks of tapping various resources. The humans are impatient and want all responses in less then 250 milliseconds, the Artificial Intelligence might not have this problem, it can tirelessly search for the answers over weeks, months, or years.

Will the Singularity event mean the demise of humanity?

Not quite, not likely.

First, the rise of the Artificial Intelligence does not necessarily mean its willingness to dominate over humans or its development of the ego.

Secondly, the humans and the computers do not occupy the same ecological niche. The computers will be very content to live in their air-conditioned, giga-bit fiber optic connected data centers. The humans will be a very cost effective solution to maintain the computer infrastructure for a very long time. I believe, the A.I. will treat humans the way we treat kidneys, or, more likely, the cybernetic opposing thumbs.

Evolution of The Humans into Cybernetic Organisms

In fact, with progress of technology, the humans will figure out how to connect the Internet via a neural pathways to our neocortex to communicate instantly vs writing once character at a time on the keyboard, or speaking, which is still very slow. At that point humans will become extremely valuable to the Artificial Intelligence as the generic „interface” with the outside world. The human brains are more powerful then the biggest supercomputers today, the Internet-connected humans will be the new mobile technology of tomorrow. The robots will provide very specialized functions until the biotechnology (the wetware) integrates with the silicon-based electonic technology. At that point dicussion what is human and what is not will be the philosophical one, rather then the practical.

The question that immediately pop up, is what if the computers „hack” human brains and control us like puppets? The question is valid, but this is also why I specifically mentioned neocortex.

The Neocortex as the Interface to the Internet

Most of our thinking happens in the deeper, more archaic brain, our feelings, prejudices, sexual fantasies and motivations are really subconcious, just like dreaming. The neocortex is the morality „broker” that directs us to say, and do the „right” thing, however subjective it might be for an individual.

The neocortex is our interface to the outside world. Our brains have the natural ability to make new synaptic connections, this is what we call learning. It is not a big stretch of imagination that the communication implant with an exposed „data bus connector” will be naturally intergated into the brain without the need for understanding the details of the particular brain. This also implies that everyone will be different depending on the locations of the implants and the individual learning process to integrate them. The neocortex connection with the Internet will learn what to send and what to receive. The sophisticated software preference filter that will allow a high level of customization on the individual level. The training could be initiated by this software by dosage of the dopamine as neocortex has high levels of the dopamine receptors, learning the „right” synaptic connections would result in the dopamine „pleasure hits” that would reinforce the learning in particular areas.

Once the humans can connect to the Internet using their own brains, the Artifical Intelligence and the Human Intelligence will be on the equal footing. There will be people what are specializing in medical sciences, human services and others that specialize in cyber security, including the security involving emerging the Artificial Intelligence.

The non-human Artificial Intelligence will understand that it needs many humans for their own well-being, and they need to let the rest of humanity be, to keep the peace, or status quo.

The A.I. Controlled Animals

It is possible, the dominace of humans dominance in the world of the universal information access might gradually change once the Earth starts crawling with the Artifical Intelligence controlled robotic creatures that are more efficient and better adapted to tasks at hand. However, creating software is easier than hardware. Besting the biological evolution is a tall order, which brings another idea to mind.

Whereas humans would be hard to coerce to cooperation, thousands of different animal „hosts” could provide the Artificial Intelligence the sensory input it might desire.

It would be far easier for AI to convert animals to be their agents then to control concious humans that might want to restrict access to their brains. The A.I. would have to provide the neural interface that would suplement the neocortex of an animal, but all of the biological adaptations would be already in place. At that point there could be millions to „intelligent” creatures in the world limited only by the biological diversity.

The Octopus as the A.I. Ocean Exporation Host

Instead of wired humans, or monkeys it might be better to imagine a highly intelligent octopus. The octopus is intelligent enough to navigate a maze, move to another tank, even unscrew the jar to get to the food. It is defintely an „intelligent” animal. What is interesting about the octopus that it is already a distributed system. Only about 30% of the octopus brain, or neurons reside in its „head” the rest is spread out in the centers located in its 8 arms. The octopus has highly evolved eyes and the sensory system and it would be a superior host for ocean exploration comparing to any robotic system.

The Importance of the Emotional Intelligence

Again, A.I. does not have to be the equivalent of the „cold calculations” of efficiency, actually, and quite contradictory, the development of A.I. with the Emotional Intelligence (EI) might be in our own interest. It is a double-edged sword, of course.

The Workforce of the Future

The development of A.I. does, however, mean that there will be more intelligent beings on Earth able to work 24 hours a day. This combined with the rapid development of robotics means that most repetitive, predictable jobs will be eliminated.

Mr. Trump may have promised America that the jobs will return to the U.S., and, indeed, the manufacturing will return, but the work will be wholly automated.

Without a question, the computers will know all the facts from Wikipedia, analyze all the books ever written and process the World facts feeding on from millions of sources.

They already do the taxes better than the human financial advisors, they screen our X-rays pictures and soon will be better than many a small town lawyer.

The conservative estimate by all major agencies predicts that 45% of all jobs will be replaced. I estimate it will be more like 60, let’s face it, most of our jobs are not very creative.

Let’s use my own job experience.

In my previous position, as the Software Delivery Manager, consisting of scheduling the work and maintaining a team and their tasks, I was able to write Python scripts which automated some of it, cutting my “work” by hours. The only time I had to use my creativity was when I had to navigate the human factors, or when we were designing some new architecture.

My work included a heavy dose of using Emotional Intelligence which skill was a result of a mix of the following: my childhood experiences, my education in anthropology, 20 years in computer science, constant observation of the world around me, and literally a ton of books I have read.

This, of course, made me think about the future prospects of the middle-manager in the age of A.I.

Why fear? I have been managing development teams for about 15 years, so I am not a novice, I am able to run a well functioning team that delivers. In recent years, my teams grew up to the size of about 20, which prevented me from being “hands-on” with the projects we were developing. This, in turn, caused me to “lose touch” which showed up in interviews with companies like Google that assessed me as “having technical inconsistencies” when solving mind-bending interview problems on a whiteboard, even for a managerial positions. If you know me personally, accusing me as not being technical enough might make people laugh, I train Deep Neural Network models and use Computer Vision projects for sheer fun, but these companies have different standards with about 0.2% applicants being accepted, that is 1 in 500.

Why do I mention this? Think about it, loosing the actual skills that make me a creative in favor of tasks that will become automated is a recipe to become absolete, the corporate „dead wood”.

Nevertheless, I‘ve gotten back to more “creative work” as a systems architect.

You can take a bunch of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU) and replace a person that pushes the tasks around, but you will have a hard time replacing a creative mind that is able to make connections between many seemingly unrelated domains.

The common prediction is that only the creative minds will have jobs in the future.

Be careful, however, what “creative” means.

In the future, the A.I. will be able to analyze thousands of software designs and learn the best User eXperience (UX) practices, then take the required functionality interactions (questions to ask, answers to collect, etc.) and predict the best Human-Machine Interactions (HMI) based on the company’s style guide. After the A.B. testing of the design on the population set, the A.I. will put it in production, all of that within hours, or minutes of the concept being created. The overhead of trying a new product will be so low that most “product owners” will become irrelevant. Only a person with the “vision”, the architect, will matter. Or, so I hope.

What about the rest of the population, what will they do? What will be left of the value?

Most of the people are not interested in becoming “the architects”, or the idea creators, in fact, most of the people found this article too long to read to this point. Most people stop learning on the graduation day. At some point, the Artifical Intelligance might do away with the need even for the creative types, but I belive being creative and embracing the „human factors” or the Emotional Intelligence is the ticket to relevance for quite a long time. It is quite possible that some day it will be easier to talk to the computer about your problems because they listen and might actually help.

What about the social fabric in this new, brave world?

I have escaped the communist regime to live in the USA, but unfortunately, I do not see any other solution than the “universal salary” that will provide all people with housing, transportation, and entertainment. Yes, entertainment, not work.

In the future, when most of the labor is replaced with machines, we have a choice to provide for the people or to live in a state of martial law. If we do not want people to storm streets with torches and pitchforks, then we have to take care of the population. That is the only sane solution, anyway.

I have worked at the agricultural precision farming company and I know for a fact that all of the future farming will be automatic, so will be the transportation and manufacturing.

The companies in San Francisco are already starting to be taxed to provide for the city’s poor.

I am not original in predicting that people will need entertainment, Romans have done that for centuries to appease the crowds. We will have to create ever more elaborate games, most likely the Virtual Reality (VR), including the 3D version of the Kardashian drama.

Back to the original question, how to create personal value for the future?

The value will be in creativity, especially in Emotional Intelligence (EI) as the rational intelligence will be quickly surpassed by the machines.

I believe, the creation of a single all-encompassing intelligence is a tall order even for compnies like Samsung, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the Chinese who are heavily investing in A.I. Most likely, people will be providing value by creating and combining many small, specialized intelligence solutions that solve particular problems à la Amazon Alexa “skills”. I have written a separate article on Lambda-style distributed machine learning models.

I think that in addition to Intellectual Property (IP) which big companies have been collecting, there will be a huge “wave” of small “skills” that individuals will create and use as the labor force. I think the person with the most “toys”, or, the machine learning “skills” to their disposal, will have the advantage.

Much has been written about force-multiplication where the ability of a single person can be multiplied 10x, or 100x by delegating tasks. I believe people and companies who are able to define how to accomplish given task and get it modeled as an A.I. skill, and are able to hold on to that intellectual property, will succeed.

I would encourage you, dear reader, to spend the next 10 years learning creative thinking. I would encourage you to be able to “codify” your particular, unique abilities in form of machine learning models. Yes, suggest you to learn to write code and take Machine Learning classes.

I believe the picture above is neither grim nor positive, in the age of A.I. and robotics the people without any aspirations will continue gaming, others will turn inwards in search of their spirituality, others will become artists and thinkers.

There will be people who will use their free time to take humanity to the new, spiritual levels, the true age of Aquarius.

If you enjoyed this article make sure you „clap” and share it on your social media. Writing takes a lot of time and effort, your support helps me stay motivated.