Tag Archive for: AI

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15 most wanted engineering skills in the future

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This post was inspired by a question on Quora and so I put my answer here on the blog as well.
Looking in our heavily research driven crystal ball, we see the following 15 engineering disciplines the most sought after in the next 25 years. In the following 25–50 years thereafter it will change a bit as AI and model engineers will build ever smarter systems that can do quite some of the engineering work – but for many reasons we are certain – not all !!!

AI / ML / NLP and friends engineering

By 2030 AI will be in any product or many components of a single product
approx. a million open positions as of today, Dec 2018

Algorithmic engineering (mathematicians)

> It’s the substance AI is made of and we need hundreds of thousands of them

Model engineering

> The biggest challenge in AI: Creating the model of what AI should be intelligent about

Molecular engineering → Molecular model engineering

>A precursor to smart materials, bio materials and much more

Smart Material engineering → Smart Material model engineering

> By 2030/2040 isch it will affect most everything we produce. Any material we deal with in our everyday’s live may be smart and do things that we can’t believe today/ It’ll be as big as AI is today if not even more revolutionary

Bio engineering → bio structure model engineering

> By 2040 it is the base for augmented human bodies. Getting eyes like an eagle, joins like a panther, reflexes and organs we can only dream of today. But it will also change the way we see all life around us and the influence we may have.

Robotics → Robotics model engineering

> an obvious one – yet the robots of the future, past 2040, will be very different. Not because of AI but because of the smart material and the bio engineering development.

Autonomous machines engineering

> Today we see robots, cars, etc. as autonomous machines. Tomorrow, 2025 onwards, we can add IOT and other autonomous devices to the mix. By 2050, we can see far remote machines on the Moon doing work we won’t do on earth…

Nano Technology engineering (re-started)

> Carbon nano tubes are revitalized as material we could use to build a space elevator and other crazy things we cannot do otherwise.

MedTech engineering → MedTech model engineering

> BY 2030 we can finally expect getting nanobots into our body for surgery but also as monitoring and other robotic tasks. It will be only the top level in that space. There is a lot ongoingly that will need very specialized engineers.

FinTech engineering → FinTech model engineering

> Whether we have a cryptocurrency comeback or a new development on our “old” currency, by 2025 blockchain like technologies is in the financial business future.

SecureTech engineering

> 2020 to 2525+ everything we need is vulnerable on its own. Security is, was and will remain to be a huge part of our technology world.

Energy systems engineering

> 2020 to 2525+ whether we will harness one day the gigavolt flashes (~10 Billion volts) or leverage our abundant geothermal energy, everything we do will need ever more energy.

Civil engineering (urbanity trend eyc.)

> Already today we are building more and bigger cities in the next 20 years until we experience the turnaround back to country live around 2050/2075 or so, especially when not only all production but also must services will be automated. In the then following 50+ years we will rebuild earth like we cannot imagine today.

Quantum computing engineering perhopes

> Not sure if we ever find a solution to the still unstable quantum states in the quantum computing theory. But if – lots of engineers will all of a sudden be needed.

There are many many more like food engineering, life style engineering, education technology engineering, health care engineering, and so forth, but the above give you probably a good idea where we are going.

P.S.
Why do we (World Innovations Forum) think so? There has never been a technology that was invented and in less than 10 years mainstream. Since we see what is in very early stage development of startups, we can see well into the next 10 years. New inventions and findings coming in in the next 10 years, will take us well into 2035 which are obviously very hard to predict. But we can at least try to predict the development that will come on top of the current development like robots that will advance but will advance even further when other developments like smart material have advanced. That brings us into year 2050. Thereafter we can only see consequences of the development we predict like the turnaround of urbanization and megacities. If most people no longer work in corporate bird cages but do things they simply love to do, join the makers movement, start their own little business and so forth, there is not only no need to live in a city but possible an urge to go back into countryside. That assumed consequence gives us fruit for thoughts beyond 2075 into 2100 or so. Again nobody really knows but we have ever better indicators and prediction models improving accuracy and to do what we do :)

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Demystifying Artificial Intelligence

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I see thousands of horror stories and get hundreds of fearful questions like will AI be harmful to humans, will “they” take over the world. People see them already as fully developed beings and thousands of times superior over humans. There is an interesting psychological analysis about that – but first let me stop this absurd craziness.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

First and foremost AI is a piece of software. It is typically written in very well known and for decades widely used programming languages such as C, C++ or Python. To make the software do what is smarter than just “if this happens then do that” software developer are using smart algorithms – mathematics. Another technique that is used is so called “Neural Networks” – but also that is pure software. The neural networks is a mechanism that is seen in our brain handling all kinds of filtering, sorting and decision providing mechanisms. So all in all, AI is software, math and libraries of techniques.

Instead of keyboard and mouse, so called “Natural language Processing” tools or in layman’s terms: speech recognition tools are used.  So we can talk to the computer and it will talk back by using speech synthesiser. And since we are used to use web cams, electric thermometers, GPS and stuff, we can attach these to the computer as well.

Now the combination of computer, software and all kind of sensors, the “machine” looks much smarter than before. But hey, it is still a machine, doing what the software we wrote, is dictating it to do.

Another thing, which started the avalanche of hysteria and craziness, is the idea that in the combination of smart algorithms and neural networks, we can actually program the machine to “learn”. The only magic in this is that we humans have an enormous respect for “learning”. The machine however learns VERY differently than we. Give the machine 100,000 images of dogs and it will learn how a dog looks like. If we now add a dog in 100,000 other pictures where also cats and other animals are in, the likelyhood to recognize the pattern of a dog is pretty high. In contrast to a human, my daughter took about 20 to 30 impressions of a dog to “learn” what a dog is. She also learned that a cat is a similar animal but not quite the same.

Why is AI such a big deal

Well, you could give an AI system the construction plan of a car. Then ask it to create an optimal body, that is as light as possible, as stiff as possible, has a dynamic material behavior in case of a crash and considerable ,ess expensive.
The AI system could instead of only 100,000 views take 10 Million iterations of each component and come back with a design where the car is only 100 KG instead of one ton, has a network style body instead of full material and using all kinds of stiffness measures that it is stronger and at the same time lighter. With less material and for instance only steel at certain point, carbon in others and so forth it would eventually cost 50%, weighs only one 10th and is much safer. Artificial INtelligence can be programmed to do things like that basically anywhere. Making enormously precise Weather Forecasts, analyze stock exchange behavior of thousands of companies over the past 100 years and  the behavior of investors by the minute to predict much better value development. It can help analyze illness, make more accurate and more neutral decisions as a judge and so forth.

If it is so cool – why don’t we do all of this now?

Well – AI is still in development. Approximately 1 million engineers in approximately 100 countries work independently on all kinds of solutions. Mathematicians join the software developers and vice versa. However it is by far not as easy as many people think. The most advanced development right now is autonomous cars. Invented originally in Germany in 1992, where the first autonomous car drove 2,000 KM from southern Germany to Scandinavia and back, all in autonomous mode. Autonomous cars may then take 20 years to get all the kinks out and be safe enough to get on the road. Politicians go back and forth whether they should support it or not, the public is in hysteria to say the least and there is a lot of uncertainty about how AI could be turned into weapons.

What risk remains with AI?

Let’s assume for a moment, we would not have automobiles today. Now somebody would come and suggest we build cars and street, but also need to take in consideration that every year more than one million people will get killed and 20 – 50 million insured. Would we allow that anybody is building those killer machines? Never ever I guess. But the CAR is not the killer it is the human that drives the car. Like in all other ares, the human that uses the gun, the human that uses the knife, the human that drives the tank. Yes, AI and Robots could be build to go to war, kill the opposing country and possibly wipe out a nation. But it is not the robot that magically makes that decision – it is the human that designs it. And as seen in 1945 in Hiroshima, we could do that already in the last century.

On the other hand, we have 340 Million occupational deadly accidents a year. How about accelerating the AI and robotics development to get machines into those jobs and safe 340 Million humans each year. This is more than people dying at wars and accidents all together.

Yes, there are risks that ill-minded people take this technology as a weapon against others. We saw this with Social Media, the Internet, any type of technology in the past.  and we need to do everything to prevent them. But those machines build from plastic, silicon and metal will not magically turn into living things with a purpose we didn’t program and wipe out all humans or stuff like that. Those visions – even coming from people like Steven Hawkins – are based in a huge deficiency of understanding what humans really are and that our “intelligence” is not more and not less to our brain, than  the muscles are to our body. Today we can lift thousands of times more with our cranes than with our muscles. Soon we will be able to think through constructions or algorithms thousand times more complex than we can calculate with our brain. But one thing have cranes and AI in common: Humans have developed them and have the interest and responsibility to make them as safe as any way possible.

Autonomous Machines, driven by Artificial Intelligence, are no living beings with a purpose to kill us. They are machines with a purpose WE GIVE THEM. And if that purpose is killing, then it is still us who made it that way. It is not something THEY CAN DO unless we allow it to go that way.

 

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Artificial Intelligence Timeline – next 50+ years

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Technological – Business – Societal  – Impact Development Timeline

The era of AMs – Autonomous Machines

2020 – 2025
We will see a rising number of products mainly chat bots, entering our day to day world. At the same time the work on “General AI” will be intensified and we are getting better and better results – yet no real products – despite the rapid development. The business impact will be substantial because access to knowledge will span all industries and will be substantially easier as conventional text search. Search engines will be either UI-less (meaning no keyboard, mouse, looking through lists but you speak to mic anywhere).
The societal impact will begin to bring a dark cloud. The start of significant unemployment in all kinds of call centers, info centers, support center…
Science Fiction movies may become rarer. Our development is faster than a movie maker can write a script, produce the movie and bring it to market. Ex-Machina II may possibly still not come out ;)

2025 – 2030
Technology development towards general AI will be in full swing but not yet really mainstream. Millions of engineers from around the globe will work on AI solutions. That includes Universal AI, multi purpose AI, single purpose AI. AIPU s (artificial intelligent processing units) will become more widely available. New Memory systems may arise. With that I mean silicon embedded intelligence to address memory content. There was a technology developed called “Content Addressed Memory” that may come to new life – now there may be a need for it.
The number of AMs (Autonomous Machines) such as AI Based self driving cars, AI based autonomous robots, AI based autonomous devices, AI based autonomous computers will rise significantly. By then everybody will sell their products with AI-Based XYZ. AI is like Internet in 1998. Widely used but still not fully developed. But everything will include AI one way or the other.
The unemployment rate will rise to very uncomfortable 100+ Million across the globe. Countries will start to TAX AMs in order to finance unemployment aid.
Unemployed will most likely not be able to find a new job. It’s when the wider public understands that AI is different to any other new technology: AI is used to make machines autonomous – rather then needing new skills to use the new technology by humans. AI is not even a technology, software, microprocessors, robots, cars everything existed, but a completely new way to use technology.
As a result, a significant shift in our society will begin. The makers movement will explode, social workers, nature-observers and protectors, artists, musicians, coaches and so forth will rise. We will move from “employed humans” to “autonomous humans”. We will grow more self determined across all levels of education and with a higher value to our society, environment and future evolution of humankind. A major societal inflection point may surface. Those who still need to “work” will push the AI development forward, knowing that if their jobs will be replaced, they can – like all the others – do what they really like to do and receive a UBI (Unconditional base income).

2030–2040
The AMs are substantially advanced. AI development languages and AI operating systems will become a standard in the tech space. Under the development systems the graphical application design tools may dominate as they can be used by pretty much any generally educated business manager. Just pointing and selecting data set sources, algorithms that analyze those data sets, selecting processors (neural networks) to pump it through and so forth. It will be the beginning of broadly available general AI. The number of AI based applications will grow faster and bigger than all conventional software together. The old software world is fading away.
The number of applications and functionalities leveraging IOT, sensor techniques, and robots will enter into all kinds of industries replacing ever more people. It will now be apparent – also for the last human on earth – that industrial work will be completely eradicated. Industrial unemployment will be raising to over a billion people in the next 10 to 15 years. Whether its office workers or manufacturing workers, AMs will take over the jobs. Everybody who is working on repetitive products or services can be replaced by an AM. Artists, will still keep creating Art any creative work that creates a unique ‘thing’ will obviously not be replaced because it would simply make no sense and cost too much. Those AMs work 3 times as long (8 versus 24 hours), no social cost, no vacation. Unemployment aid will at the very latest now become an unconditional base income for everybody, funded by the earlier implemented Value added AM tax. Autonomous Humans will now become the majority.
We also reached another interesting inflection point. Product costs are no longer determined by the amount of labor cost – back to raw material cost based pricing. But the raw material may actually sooner or later come from other planets. Science Fiction? No – this is now becoming reality. Not only because we understand that renewable ENERGY is limited but also recyclable MATERIAL is not infinitely available on earth. A billion cars with Lithium Batteries would require more Lithium after the first few replacement than we have on earth.

2040 – 2050
The AMs will evolve further, write complex algorithms themselves, beyond our own capabilities, create structures and construct products beyond our intellectual capacity. Humans, however, will also evolve further and deeper than we can imagine today, in 2018. Our brain will have more capacity for creativity because we will no longer need to remember when King Ramses built his empire, who his father was and so fort. We have that knowledge in our extended, collective, connected technical brain. Internet connection is omnipresent and guaranteed on every square inch on land or water on earth. Mass products in any way or shape can be constructed, prepared and produced by AMs. Only the decision, what we actually want to create, will still be coming from the human mind. And latest by then we will bring forward real self aware AMs (if not much earlier). There are many people including me working on self conscious AI concepts already. Yet even self aware AMs are far away from the human brain capabilities. The AI research will help us better understand what we are actually capable of. We will learn more about ourselves in these 10 years than in all the 300,000 years before. The human mind’s creativity is so complex that AI is still very far away from coming even close to it. We will have a far deeper understanding of the human mind than just our intelligence. We will understand that intelligence is just one power of our mind, similar to our power to move, the power of our muscles and the power of our orientation – which we have all augmented already some hundreds of years ago. We will understand artificial intelligence is no more than our artificial muscles, which we call tools.

2050 – 2075
Leveraging our added skills, collective knowledge our amazing machines, scientists will be replaced by those machines as well. Testing something new and prove a repetitive behavior to make it a scientifically proven fact, is much better done by an AI system than by a Ph.D. ‘system’. Science will be done by AMs across all factions. At the same time, innovative and creative ideas will explode, AM’s will analyze and verify those ideas in no time. AM owners will compete for those crazy but verified ideas and build it. AMs will help revitalize space exploration in a new and rather meaningful way. We will need other places than earth to harvest raw material and we need other planets for recycling or wast disposal. AMs, powered by solar energy are the best “people” to send to other planets or our moon to extract, produce, recycle, deposit. We don’t even need to terraform Mars for that. But we may safe Mars for exploring Terraforming together with AMs. Autonomous Machines and Autonomous Humans will build the most powerful synergy ever built. We will be depending on AI, more than on any other technology built so far. Most technology can be replaced by something else. But an AI system that can iterate through millions of ideas for any given solution in a few hours is something not only beyond what we built but beyond ourselves.

More details on how and why thousands of different jobs in 300+ industries, from around the world will be replaced in the next 30 years and how we manage the inflection point from the disaster of being “unemployed” to the luxury of becoming an autonomous human will be available on: World With No Work

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Is AI the last invention humans will do?

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I see this question popping up over and over again. At present it may look like Autonomous Machines will carry on the technological development and we sit and watch. Well – here is my thinking:

In 1980 the end of technology was predicted
I remember a day where my boss said “I think with the invention of the 8 bit microprocessor we are at the end of technology development – we will never see a 16 bit microprocessor in commercial use.” I was laughing but he was dead serious. Little did he know that we were not at the end but barely at the beginning of the micro computer revolution.

In 2020 the end of humanity will be seriously predicted
We are very much in the infant stage of AI. If we developed a fully autonomous and self aware AI system we are really at the beginning of a new technology era. Those machines will help us reach frontiers that even SciFi authors don’t see today but will fuel a whole new era of SciFi stories soon.

By 2030 We will see early tangible results
Imagine that we will be able to calculate the least possible effort to develop purified water for all humans on earth – and just do it. Be able to produce food for every single person even at 15 Billion population. We will quickly move away from plastic robots to fully biological material based robots.

By 2050 replacing general ‘work’ with AI Tax based income
By now we may need to / are in the luxurious position to replace 50 – 100 million jobs. By taxing Autonomous Machines we can fuel a pool of UBI (Unconditional Base Income) so those people will be covered and the ones how operate such machines can still do it profitably. Going forward most people in developed countries won’t have to find a job but can do what they are most excited about and evolve to “autonomous humans” in its own right.

By 2075 Smart material development may be in full swing
The very next big thing that already started is smart material and biological material. A Doctor in Germany developed the first artificial aortic ventricle of a heart made fully from biological material. This will keep going for at least 100 years. Smart material is changing its shape and even molecular structure based on electromagnetic impulses. Countless new applications.  The synthesis of smart material constructed and manipulated using – again – AI brings us to all new technological realms.

By 2100 We may reach a state of nearly abundant energy
We know that our sun is boosting unimaginable amount of energy every millisecond. Even our mother planet earth does that in its core. Today we still neither harvest that energy properly – let alone being able to emulate the phenomenon and create Terra Watts generated in a little box behind our homes.

By 2150 Body augmentation may get us to an age of 500 to 1,000 years
Then think about human body augmentation, Artificial yet biological “replacement parts” for virtually everything. Maybe not the brain by then but maybe even that.

By 2200 Terra-Forming
Again all new technologies, powerful energy generators, knowledge about space travel and planet construction. At that stage we actually need technology like AI to do a few billion iterations of possible ways to do what we want to do – a human being would never be able to do that. An AI system on the other side would never “create” the idea and suggesting:  “Hey human what do you think about the idea of making Mars an inhabitable planet”.

Between 2200 and 2500 longer distance space travel
We are not giving up on that one. And we cannot. Earth will be hit by a major asteroid in the next some 100,000 years and our human brain has further developed that we actually care. We will need to find ways to leave our paradise – one day.

Between 2,500 and 3,000 crossing parts of our galaxy
No, forget space ships and forget low speed travel of 100,000 miles per hour. It will be something entirely different – we still need to develop the very foundation of the necessary physics. By that time maybe we are able to develop our own chemical elements and the new Periodic Table is more like a book.

By 5,000 we may…
wonder what next and build a fully biological being, which only needs electric power to survive. We put it into a space ship and send it to Alpha Centaur, where it should start a life on its own – never letting it know where it came from, so we don’t get unexpected visits :) We just watch it develop from a safe distance. We may visit a bit closer – just hoping they don’t discover us and think we are a UFO with extra alpha centaurical live :)

So – NO, AI is not the last innovation it is actually the first of an all new technological, economical and societal era. We won’t hit a point with no more advancement any time soon. And IF, we will advance in a very different way and laugh about our neanderthal like toys including space ships, AI, terra forming and the other primitive gimmick.

Happy innovation

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Why today’s human minds are incapable to outperform AI

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Today we may debate whether or not a robot will ever be superior to a human. Superiority has many angels. And a robot may not catch all of them. But in the basic work life, it is different. And maybe one robot may not be as good as a human – but a whole range of networked Artificial Intelligence-based robots will outperform us in almost any segment of work on all levels and all industries !!!

 

Our single biggest disadvantage

The vast majority of humans, still today, keep knowledge close to their chest. Sharing of knowledge, experience, and mistakes is not our biggest strength. Sitting in a corner, thinking through the permutations of what happens with a machine in certain circumstances – is our biggest strength. But we know that our brain capacity is not unlimited. As long as we continue to share only if really necessary, think for ourselves, hope we earn special attention for our knowledge – we are in danger that all our jobs get eradicated before we adapt to newer better behavior. Our physical limitations are too weak to stand up against a series of highly developed AI networked technology – whatever we call it.

Cultural Advancement

We are what we got introduced to by our cultural frameworks. Our parents teach us to be humble, not to share our experience unless it is necessary, to experiment for ourselves until we are sure that our experiments are successful. We are conditioned to not talk about things that are still uncertain. Our communication prison is huge. Some cultures however advanced already. And the most interesting thing is that it was actually that very advancement that brought the AI / Robotics technology to life – Silicon Valley. Now some may argue it was elsewhere and so and so already had developed that first version of AI years ago. Well – so sorry to say that, an innovation has absolutely no value unless it is brought to a broader market. “The initial value if any innovation is zero”. Without cultural advancement, we will maintain that widening gap between developed and emerging countries. As long as emerging countries do not embrace more openness, a culture where failure is not just OK but actually good and a key part of learning – the country will remain to be an emerging country.

Artificial Intelligence, biggest driver for human advancements

Humans have one extraordinary ability: humans can adapt to new situations within one and the same generation. No other life form can do that. Big Data is giving businesses who leverage big data a huge advantage over others because they simply know better and faster what is going on. If we learn that networked AI systems will be able to tap into those data and create analysis, able to make decisions and derive strategies from the results, They will be ahead of us and we will essentially do what they suggest. We can’t even verify in time so we simply go ahead and do it. Yes it’s still a tool – but we do what the tool is telling us what to do without even being able to debate it. But we will learn one thing: if we connect our brains we get a whole new edge – maybe beyond our own imagination.

Experiment at Society3 World Innovations Forum

Imagine we do what these AI networks do and network our brains, very simply on a daily base by sharing, communication, analyzing our own mistakes and come to new conclusions every day? The collective intellect when really in action has unknown and incomprehensible reserves. The least we can do is to explore them. And it is almost for free. We only have through some of the old cultural remains overboard. At Society3 this is exactly what is going on right now. Society3 is building a digital layer across the globe that exists to connect people and their ideas, challenges, questions and answers together. http://society3.com We are not here to win a competition with AI-based robots but simply bring human entrepreneurs to a level that has never seen before.

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