The Robots Are Coming

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you're out of a job."

Kevin Kelly speculates

Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization. It will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or interesting by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. This is a big deal, and now it's here.

The observation that AI will appear quite boring is astute. How excited were you when your Facebook feed was spontaneously better organized, or when your autocorrect seemed to stop harassing you as much as before? These are small percentage changes in usability, but small percentages add up to market-dominating products. He goes on to describe a conversation with Larry Page, along with this insightful example

Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better. Every time you type a query, click on a search-generated link, or create a link on the web, you are training the Google AI. When you type “Easter Bunny” into the image search bar and then click on the most Easter Bunny-looking image, you are teaching the AI what an Easter bunny looks like. Each of the 12.1 billion queries that Google's 1.2 billion searchers conduct each day tutor the deep-learning AI over and over again. With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand-fold more data and 100 times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI 

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The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people use it. The more people that use it, the smarter it gets. Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.

Much like a carcass in the wilderness, no data is to be wasted. It's quite easy to forget that these services are far from free -- you are feeding the beast. The observation regarding accelerating returns is incredibly important; see Watson. He goes on to describe the synergistic possibilities

If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers.

Again, bang on. Things then go off the rails a bit

Most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by special-purpose, narrowly focused software brains that can, for example, translate any language into any other language, but do little else. Drive a car, but not converse. Or recall every pixel of every video on YouTube but not anticipate your work routines. In the next 10 years, 99 percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly or indirectly, will be nerdily autistic, supersmart specialists.

I view this as fairly naive. I think he underestimates (1) how trivial it will be to network an integrate these highly trained algorithms (2) how the drum of progress will have us to do just that, and (3) how nonexistent the regulatory structure regarding AI will be when it "arrives". We are thirty years into the internet and governments are nowhere near catching up.

Overall the post is excellent and worth a full read.