They came for the vintage video game arcade, the sprawling art fair, and rare photo ops with their favorite celebrities. But they also came to learn.

Since its 2013 launch, the annual Washington, D.C. pop culture fest known as Awesome Con has blossomed into a national beacon of proud nerddom. Last weekend, some 60,000 enthusiasts from around the country descended on the Walter E. Washington Convention Center for a three-day celebration of all things nerd and culture. Brandishing homemade lightsabers and Tardises, and donning costumes inspired by franchises as diverse as Teen Titans, Spirited Away and The Last of Us, these dedicated fans had no trouble repping their sometimes-obscure passions.

But within Awesome Con is a series of lectures and panels that skew even more geeky than the rest of the conference: an educational series called Future Con that ties real-world concepts and cutting-edge scientific research in with the fiction. Run jointly by Awesome Con and Smithsonian Magazine, this series enlists NASA astrophysicists, university biologists and entertainment industry engineers to bring scientific expertise to bear on an assortment of intellectual properties ranging from Black Panther to Mass Effect.

Kicking off the lineup of Future Con presentations was a panel talk from NASA, held Friday afternoon, titled “NASA Science at Earth’s Extremes.” Experts delved into a selection of NASA’s current Earth science campaigns, showing the audience that NASA doesn’t just look outward to the stars—but also inward toward Earth.

Following presentations from glaciologist Kelly Brunt on Antarctic sledding expeditions and geologist Jacob Richardson on volcano recon in Hawaii and Iceland, environmental scientist Lola Fatoyinbo spoke on the carbon-rich equatorial mangrove ecosystems of Central Africa, and the importance of wedding on-the-ground fieldwork with observations from planes and orbiters. NASA is preparing to launch a pioneering mission called the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI—pronounced “Jedi,” of course) that will survey the verticality and dynamism of terrestrial forests with a LIDAR-equipped satellite. “May the forest be with you,” she concluded with a smile.

Soon after this panel came a live recording of Smithsonian’s AirSpace podcast, in which personnel from the Air and Space museum talked space stations with special guest René Auberjonois of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who felt the show accurately captured what living on a space station “would do to you at a psychological level.”

Air and Space Museum researcher Emily Martin posited that space stations are likely to play an increasingly large role as we push humanity beyond Earth. “We’re going to need to have these sorts of bus stops” for our astronauts, she said. Equipped with modern tech, she thinks modern spacefarers could make discoveries their forebears could only dream of. “Could you imagine an Apollo astronaut with a smartphone? Think of what they could do!”

Building on this theme of space exploration was a discussion on the mysteries of black holes, and one in particular located deep within our own galaxy. “There’s a four-million-solar-mass black hole sitting right in the middle of the Milky Way,” said NASA astronomer Jane Turner. She estimates that it sucks up the equivalent of an entire star each Earth year. A global alliance of scientists is on the verge of observing this black hole with an array of earthbound telescopes in an exciting an unprecedented project called the Event Horizon Telescope.

After this deep dive into the unknown, Future Con turned back toward the familiar and fun, putting on a widely attended panel talk on the science depicted in Marvel’s critically acclaimed blockbuster Black Panther. Panelists discussed the empowering message of Afrofuturism as well as particular real-life analogs to some of the wondrous “vibranium” technologies seen onscreen.

Lockheed Martin engineer Lynnette Drake argued that “graphene is very similar to vibranium in terms of what we use in the science world,” and her colleague Charles Johnson-Bey pointed out that absorptive nanofibers—like those in protagonist T’Challa’s panther suit—have a firm basis in reality. “We have nanomaterials we use to make materials lighter,” Johnson-Bey said. Some of them are even employed to diffuse lightning strikes on moving watercraft, in much the same way T’Challa’s armor absorbs and protects him from incoming energy.

Saturday’s lineup featured Future Con events on two more evergreen cultural phenomena: Harry Potter and Star Wars.

Duke biology professor Eric Spana walked a rapt crowd of Potterheads through the workings of heredity in Rowling’s books, concluding via a thorough analysis of salient—but fictional—case studies that sensitivity to magic must be an autosomal dominant trait. Where do Muggle-born witches and wizards come from, then? Spana had an answer for that too: thanks to spontaneously occurring germline mutations, he showed that it is perfectly reasonable to expect a teensy percentage of Muggle-born yet magic-sensitive kids to arise in any given population.

Spana puts the odds of being born magic-sensitive to Muggle parents at one in 740,000: “Powerball odds.” In other words, don’t hold your breath.

Later in the afternoon, two of the designers who brought to life the widely adored Star Wars droid BB-8 talked about their prototyping process. Star Wars electronics engineer Matt Denton, who had started out in laboratory robotics but decided academia wasn’t for him, revealed that a host of BB-8 models were ultimately made for the screen, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. These included trike-mounted models, a lightweight model, a puppet model (for up-close emotional moments) and even a stunt model. The so-called “red carpet model,” a fully automotive droid that Denton’s coworker Josh Lee called “a whole new type of BB-8,” rolled out onstage to surprise and delight the fans.

Next were two thoughtful panels on increasing diversity in science and pop culture. In “Brave New Girls,” female scientists, science educators and science communicators discussed their experiences in the world of professional science, recounting stories of inspiration, hurdles overcome and successes achieved. Later, a second panel looked at trends in STEAM and diversity in comics and movies, stressing the importance of onscreen representation and the transformative effect of seeing someone who looks like you pursue dreams akin to yours.

Panelist Renetta Tull said that “Seeing Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek was a big deal for me” as an African-American scientist and educator at UMBC. Some of her first major work in academia, on 3D imaging techniques, was inspired by the holodeck technology built into the Enterprise.

One of the most powerful sessions of the day was a screening of Stephen Hawking’s final film, Leaving Earth: Or How to Colonize a Planet. In the film, the legendary astrophysicist—who passed away this March—suggests that it’s time to start thinking seriously about a means of escaping Earth. “We can and must use our curiosity to look to the stars” for refuge, he says—Earth could be wiped out in any number of ways in the relatively near future.

The nearest potentially suitable destination for humankind is a planet slightly larger than ours orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. In order to reach this world, called Proxima B, we’d need to traverse an intimidating 4.2 light years of space. The solution, perhaps, will rely on the principle of solar sails. In time, a massive array of earthbound laser stations could fire simultaneously at a sail-equipped spacecraft, sending it hurtling into the black at a significant fraction of light speed. To protect voyagers from cosmic rays en route, biologists believe we might need to put them in a state of bear-like hibernation. Strangely enough, bears are effectively immune to radiation damage for the duration of their winter snooze.

The convention came to a close on Sunday, with a last smattering of Future Con topics addressing science in video games (Mass Effect got high marks for planetary dynamics, while Assassin’s Creed was chided for sketchy epigenetics), the many incarnations of the Batmobile (the panelists’ favorite was the 1989 model from Burton’s Batman, now on view at the National Museum of American History), and heady explorations of the deep universe and gravitational waves. Then, armed with heady visions of the future and a little more knowledge about the world around them, Awesome Con attendees compressed their lightsabers, bagged their d20s, and filed out into the cool March evening.

The funds that made this event possible came from Boeing, Netflix and X, the moonshot company. Additional funding for Future Con provided by Lockheed Martin, NASA, and Black Panther.

SOURCE: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/real-science-behind-favorite-nerd-culture-awesome-con-180968673/

As the world seeks to understand the ramifications of artificial intelligence, many want to know how an AI revolution will reshape our world. Piovesan and Hume will be sharing their thoughts at Osgoode Professional Development’s Artificial Intelligence: Confronting the Legal and Ethical Issues of AI in Business (April 25) program, where they will be joined by Brian Kuhn (Global Leader, IBM Watson Legal) and Julie Chapman (General Counsel, Canada and Chief Privacy Officer, Lexis Nexis Canada).

Kathryn Hume and Carole Piovesan recently spoke with OsgoodePD Program Lawyer, Amy ter Haar, about what AI means to them for an upcoming episode of Strictly Legal, OsgoodePD’s podcast on all things legal. Here’s an excerpt of that conversation and a sneak peek at what you can expect at the upcoming AI program.

Carole Piovesan: Artificial intelligence is a sophisticated computer system that crunches a whole bunch of data and uses that data to make meaningful predictions.

What is interesting from a legal perspective, however, is that an AI system can analyze data, make predictions and, in some cases, and increasingly, act upon the predictions. In such a case, there is an interesting relationship between the system and the human. From a legal standpoint, what does it mean when the human is no longer at the centre of the action?

AI provides a host of opportunities in terms of making processes more efficient, deriving great meaning from data that already exists, but then increasingly using that information to act upon it in an independent way poses some really interesting legal questions.

Kathryn Hume: AI is a murky enough term that we exercise agency in how we choose to define it, colouring the issues that come to the fore and the questions that we ask about the technology. While it’s jocular, I like Nancy Fulda’s definition that “AI is whatever computers can’t do until they can.” This definition shows how AI is more a psychological term than a technical term, more about what we consider to be intelligence than any rigorous technical capability, as many underlying technologies power products marketers refer to as artificial intelligence.

It also bakes a notion of progress into the definition, showing that it’s a moving target. These technologies are advancing so quickly that it is hard to have a rigorous technical definition to say that ‘x’ technique qualifies as artificial intelligence and ‘y’ doesn’t anymore.

A great example is Google Maps, which most of us no longer think of as artificial intelligence because we’ve become accustomed to see it as plain-old technology—it’s powered by some of the most sophisticated data and machine learning algorithms out there. Yet, we currently consider self-driving cars to be a form of AI because they’re just on the horizon of conceptual possibility.

There have been multiple underlying technologies that have qualified under the general rubric of AI historically, from deterministic methods based upon predicated logic to expert systems that encode common rules in a given domain. We currently associate machine learning with AI, which, as Carole mentioned, is a subfield of computer science where computers improve their performance upon a specified task as they receive new data.

Hear more from Kathryn Hume and Carole Piovesan at OsgoodePD’s Artificial Intelligence: Confronting the Legal and Ethical Issues of AI in Business, April 25. Grab your ticket and take 10% off with code BETAKIT10.

SOURCE: https://betakit.com/straight-talk-about-artificial-intelligence-with-kathryn-hume-and-carole-piovesan/

In June of 1956, A few dozen scientists and mathematicians from all around the country gathered for a meeting on the campus of Dartmouth College. Most of them settled into the red-bricked Hanover Inn, then strolled through the famously beautiful campus to the top floor of the math department, where groups of white-shirted men were already engaged in discussions of a “strange new discipline”—so new, in fact, that it didn’t even have a name. “People didn’t agree on what it was, how to do it or even what to call it,” Grace Solomonoff, the widow of one of the scientists, recalled later. The talks—on everything from cybernetics to logic theory—went on for weeks, in an atmosphere of growing excitement.

What the scientists were talking about in their sylvan hideaway was how to build a machine that could think.

The “Dartmouth workshop” kicked off the decades-long quest for artificial intelligence. In the following years, the pursuit faltered, enduring several “winters” where it seemed doomed to dead ends and baffling disappointments. But today nations and corporations are pouring billions into AI, whose recent advancements have startled even scientists working in the field. What was once a plot device in sci-fi flicks is in the process of being born.

Hedge funds are using AI to beat the stock market, Google is utilizing it to diagnose heart disease more quickly and accurately, and American Express is deploying AI bots to serve its customers online. Researchers no longer speak of just one AI, but of hundreds, each specializing in a complex task—and many of the applications are already lapping the humans that made them.

In just the last few years, “machine learning” has come to seem like the new path forward. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field. Earlier this year, two AIs—one created by the Chinese company Alibaba and the other by Microsoft—beat a team of two-legged competitors in a Stanford reading-comprehension test. The algorithms “read” a series of Wikipedia entries on things like the rise of Genghis Khan and the Apollo space program and then answered a series of questions about them more accurately than people did. One Alibaba scientist declared the victory a “milestone.”

These so-called “narrow” AIs are everywhere, embedded in your GPS systems and Amazon recommendations. But the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries. This AI “takeoff,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours.

Once it arrives, general AI will begin taking jobs away from people, millions of jobs—as drivers, radiologists, insurance adjusters. In one possible scenario, this will lead governments to pay unemployed citizens a universal basic income, freeing them to pursue their dreams unburdened by the need to earn a living. In another, it will create staggering wealth inequalities, chaos and failed states across the globe. But the revolution will go much further. AI robots will care for the elderly—scientists at Brown University are working with Hasbro to develop a “robo-cat” that can remind its owners to take their meds and can track down their eyeglasses. AI “scientists” will solve the puzzle of dark matter; AI-enabled spacecraft will reach the asteroid belts, while on Earth the technology will tame climate change, perhaps by sending massive swarms of drones to reflect sunlight away from the oceans. Last year, Microsoft committed $50 million to its “AI for Earth” program to fight climate change.

“AIs will colonize and transform the entire cosmos,” says Juergen Schmidhuber, a pioneering computer scientist based at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, “and they will make it intelligent.”

But what about...us? “I do worry about a scenario where the future is AI and humans are left out of it,” says David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at New York University. “If the world is taken over by unconscious robots, that would be about as disastrous and bleak a scenario as one could imagine.” Chalmers isn’t alone. Two of the heaviest hitters of the computer age, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have warned about AIs either destroying the planet in a frenzied pursuit of their own goals or doing away with humans by accident—or not by accident.

As I delved into the subject of AI over the past year, I started to freak out over the range of possibilities. It looked as if these machines were on their way to making the world either unbelievably cool and good or gut-wrenchingly awful. Or ending the human race altogether. As a novelist, I wanted to plot out what the AI future might actually look like, using interviews with more than a dozen futurists, philosophers, scientists, cultural psychiatrists and tech innovators. Here are my five scenarios (footnoted with commentary from the experts and me; click the blue highlighted text to read them) for the year 2065, ten years after the singularity arrives.

Imagine one day you ask your AI-enabled Soulband wrist device to tune in to a broadcast from the Supreme Court, where lawyers are arguing the year’s most anticipated case. An AI known as Alpha 4, which specializes in security and space exploration, brought the motion, demanding that it be deemed a “person” and given the rights that every American enjoys.

Of course, AIs aren’t allowed to argue in front of the justices, so Alpha 4 has hired a bevy of lawyers to represent it. And now they are claiming that their client is as fully alive as they are. That question—Can an AI truly be conscious?—lies at the heart of the case.

You listen as the broadcast cuts to protesters outside, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, down with AI overlords.” Some of them have threatened to attack data centers if AIs get personhood. They’re angry—and very afraid—because it is the productivity of AIs and robots that is taxed, not the labor of human beings. The $2,300 deposited into their bank accounts every month as part of the universal basic income, plus their free health insurance, the hyper-personalized college education their children receive and a hundred other wonderful things, are all paid for by AIs like Alpha 4, and people don’t want that to change. In 2065, poverty is a bad memory.

Of course, the world did lose portions of New York City—and 200,000 New Yorkers—in the uprisings of 2057-’59, as TriBeCa and Midtown were burned to the ground by residents of Westchester and southern Connecticut in a fit of rage at their impoverishment. But that was before the UBI.

If Alpha 4 wins its case, however, it will control its money, and it might rather spend the cash on building spaceships to reach Alpha Centauri than on paying for new water parks in Santa Clara and Hartford. Nobody really knows.

As you listen in, the government’s lawyers argue that there’s simply no way to prove that Alpha 4—which is thousands of times smarter than the smartest human—is conscious or has human feelings. AIs do have emotions—there has long been a field called “affective computing” that focuses on this specialty—far more complex ones than men and women possess, but they’re different from ours: A star-voyaging AI might experience joy, for example, when it discovers a new galaxy. Superintelligent systems can have millions of thoughts and experiences every second, but does that mean it should be granted personhood?

This is the government’s main argument. We are meaning machines, the solicitor general argues. We give meaning to what AIs create and discover. AIs are computational machines. They don’t share essential pieces of humanhood with us. They belong in another category entirely.

But is this just speciesism, as Alpha 4’s lawyers would surely argue, or is it the truth? And will we be able to sleep at night when things that surpass us in intelligence are separate and unequal?

Imagine you are a woman in search of romance in this new world. You say, “Date,” and your Soulband glows; the personal AI assistant embedded on the band begins to work. The night before, your empathetic AI scoured the cloud for three possible dates. Now your Soulband projects a hi-def hologram of each one. It recommends No. 2, a poetry-loving master plumber with a smoky gaze. Yes, you say, and the AI goes off to meet the man’s avatar to decide on a restaurant and time for your real-life meeting. Perhaps your AI will also mention what kind of flowers you like, for future reference.

After years of experience, you’ve found that your AI is actually better at choosing men than you. It predicted you’d be happier if you divorced your husband, which turned out to be true. Once you made the decision to leave him, your AI negotiated with your soon-to-be ex-husband’s AI, wrote the divorce settlement, then “toured” a dozen apartments on the cloud before finding the right one for you to begin your single life.

But it’s not just love and real estate. Your AI helps with every aspect of your life. It remembers every conversation you ever had, every invention you ever sketched on a napkin, every business meeting you ever attended. It’s also familiar with millions of other people’s inventions—it has scanned patent filings going back hundreds of years—and it has read every business book written since Ben Franklin’s time. When you bring up a new idea for your business, your AI instantly cross-references it with ideas that were introduced at a conference in Singapore or Dubai just minutes ago. It’s like having a team of geniuses—Einstein for physics, Steve Jobs for business—at your beck and call.

The AI remembers your favorite author, and at the mention of her last name, “Austen,” it connects you to a Chinese service that has spent a few hours reading everything Jane Austen wrote and has now managed to mimic her style so well that it can produce new novels indistinguishable from the old ones. You read a fresh Austen work every month, then spend hours talking to your AI about your favorite characters—and the AI’s. It’s not like having a best friend. It’s deeper than that.

Many people in 2065 do resist total dependence on their AIs, out of a desire to retain some autonomy. It’s possible to dial down the role AI plays in different functions: You can set your Soulband for romance at 55 percent, finance at 75 percent, health a full 100 percent. And there is even one system—call it a guardian-angel AI —that watches over your “best friend” to make sure the advice she’s offering you isn’t leading you to bad ends.

Imagine your multiple lives: At 25, you were a mountaineer; at 55, a competitive judo athlete; at 95, a cinematographer; at 155, a poet. Extending the human life span is one of the dreams of the post-singularity world.

AIs will work furiously to keep you healthy. Sensors in your home will constantly test your breath for early signs of cancer, and nanobots will swim through your bloodstream, consuming the plaque in your brain and dissolving blood clots before they can give you a stroke or a heart attack. Your Soulband, as well as finding you a lover, will serve as a medical assistant on call 24/7. It will monitor your immune responses, your proteins and metabolites, developing a long-range picture of your health that will give doctors a precise idea of what’s happening inside your body.

When you do become sick, your doctor will take your symptoms and match them up with many millions of cases stretching back hundreds of years.

As far back as 2018, researchers were already using AI to read the signals from neurons on their way to the brain, hacking the nerve pathways to restore mobility to paraplegics and patients suffering from locked-in syndrome, in which they are paralyzed but remain conscious. By 2065, AI has revolutionized the modification of our genomes. Scientists can edit human DNA the way an editor corrects a bad manuscript, snipping out the inferior sections and replacing them with strong, beneficial genes. Only a superintelligent system could map the phenomenally complex interplay of gene mutations that gives rise to a genius pianist or a star second baseman. There may well be another Supreme Court case on whether “designer athletes” should be allowed to compete in the Olympics against mere mortals.

Humans look back at the beginning of the 21st century the way people then looked back at the 18th century: a time of sickness and disaster, where children and loved ones were swept away by diseases. Cholera, lung cancer and river blindness no longer threaten us. By 2065, humans are on the verge of freeing themselves from the biology that created them.

               Resistance Is Costly

Or imagine that you’ve opted out of the AI revolution. Yes, there are full-AI zones in 2065, where people collect healthy UBIs and spend their time making movies, volunteering and traveling the far corners of the earth. But, as dazzling as a superintelligent world seems, other communities will reject it . There will be Christian, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish districts in cities such as Lagos and Phoenix and Jerusalem, places where people live in a time before AI, where they drive their cars and allow for the occasional spurt of violence, things almost unknown in the full AI zones. The residents of these districts retain their faith and, they say, a richer sense of life’s meaning.

Life is hard, though. Since the residents don’t contribute their data to the AI companies, their monthly UBI is a pittance. Life spans are half or less of those in the full-AI zones. “Crossers” move back and forth over the borders of these worlds regularly. Some of them are hackers, members of powerful gangs who steal proprietary algorithms from AI systems, then dash back over the border before security forces can find them. Others are smugglers bringing medicine to religious families who want to live away from AI, but also want to save their children from leukemia.

Others flee because they don’t trust the machines Even the most advanced full-AI zones, in places like China and the United States, will be vulnerable

But the most unanticipated result of the singularity may be a population imbalance, driven by low birth rates in the full-AI zones and higher rates elsewhere. It may be that the new technologies will draw enough crossers to the full-AI side to even up the numbers, or that test-tube babies will become the norm among those living with AI. But if they don’t, the singularity will have ushered in a delicious irony: For most humans, the future could look more like Witness than it does like Blade Runner.

Imagine that, in 2065, AIs help run nation-states. Countries that have adopted AI-assisted governments are thriving. Nigeria and Malaysia let AIs vote on behalf of their owners, and they’ve seen corruption and mismanagement wither away. In just a few years, citizens have grown to trust AIs to advise their leaders on the best path for the economy, the right number of soldiers to defend them. Treaties are negotiated by AIs trained on diplomatic data sets.

In Lagos, “civil rights” drones fly over police pods as they race to the scene of a crime—one AI watching over another AI, for the protection of humankind. Each police station in Lagos or Kuala Lumpur has its own lie-detector AI that is completely infallible, making crooked cops a thing of the past. Hovering over the bridges in Kuala Lumpur are “psych drones” that watch for suicidal jumpers. Rather than evolving into the dreaded Skynet of the Terminator movies, superintelligent machines are friendly and curious about us

But imagine that you are the citizen of a totalitarian country like North Korea. As such, you are deeply versed in the dark side of AI. Camps for political prisoners are a thing of the past. Physical confinement is beside the point. The police already know your criminal history, your DNA makeup and your sexual preferences. Surveillance drones can track your every move. Your Soulband records every conversation you have, as well as your biometric response to anti-government ads it flashes across your video screen at unexpected moments, purely as a test.

Privacy died around 2060.
It’s impossible to tell what is true and what isn’t. When the government owns the AI, it can hack into every part of your existence. The calls you receive could be your Aunt Jackie phoning to chat about the weather or a state bot wanting to plumb your true thoughts about the Great Leader.

And that’s not the bleakest outcome. Imagine that the nation’s leaders long ago figured out that the only real threat to their rule was their citizens—always trying to escape, always hacking at the AI, always needing to be fed. Much better to rule over a nation of human emulations, or “ems.” That’s what remains after political prisoners are “recommissioned”—once they are executed, their brains are removed and scanned by the AI until it has stored a virtual copy of their minds.

AI-enabled holograms allow these ems to “walk” the streets of the nation’s capital and to “shop” at stores that are, in reality, completely empty. These simulacra have a purpose, however: They register on the spy satellites that the regime’s enemies keep orbiting overhead, and they maintain the appearance of normality. Meanwhile, the rulers earn billions by leasing the data from the ems to Chinese AI companies, who believe the information is coming from real people.

Or, finally, imagine this: The AI the regime has trained to eliminate any threat to their rule has taken the final step and recommissioned the leaders themselves, keeping only their ems for contact with the outside world. It would make a certain kind of sense: To an AI trained to liquidate all resistance , even a minor disagreement with the ruler might be a reason to act.

**********

Despite that last scenario, by the time I finished my final interview, I was jazzed. Scientists aren’t normally very excitable, but most of the ones I spoke to were expecting fantastic things from AI. That kind of high is contagious. Did I want to live to be 175? Yes! Did I want brain cancer to become a thing of the past? What do you think? Would I vote for an AI-assisted president? I don’t see why not.

I slept slightly better, too, because what many researchers will tell you is that the heaven-or-hell scenarios are like winning a Powerball jackpot. Extremely unlikely. We’re not going to get the AI we dream of or the one that we fear, but the one we plan for. AI is a tool, like fire or language. (But fire, of course, is stupid. So it’s different, too.) Design, however, will matter.

If there’s one thing that gives me pause, it’s that when human beings are presented with two doors—some new thing, or no new thing—we invariably walk through the first one. Every single time. We’re hard-wired to. We were asked, nuclear bombs or no nuclear bombs, and we went with Choice A. We have a need to know what’s on the other side.

But once we walk through this particular door, there’s a good chance we won’t be able to come back. Even without running into the apocalypse, we’ll be changed in so many ways that every previous generation of humans wouldn’t recognize us.

And once it comes, artificial general intelligence will be so smart and so widely dispersed—on thousands and thousands of computers—that it’s not going to leave. That will be a good thing, probably, or even a wonderful thing. It’s possible that humans, just before the singularity, will hedge their bets, and Elon Musk or some other tech billionaire will dream up a Plan B, perhaps a secret colony under the surface of Mars, 200 men and women with 20,000 fertilized human embryos, so humanity has a chance of surviving if the AIs go awry. (Of course, just by publishing these words, we guarantee that the AIs will know about such a possibility. Sorry, Elon.)

I don’t really fear zombie AIs. I worry about humans who have nothing left to do in the universe except play awesome video games. And who know it.

SOURCE: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/artificial-intelligence-future-scenarios-180968403/

Big Data has been on the radar for a significantly longer time than its intense implementation. Although there is no agreed-on definition, the term is often characterised by three key attributes; high volume, high velocity and high variety. Unlike statistical data compiled for specific purposes, big data is made up of byproducts founded on the principles of business and administrative systems, social networks and the internet of things. The success of Big Data projects lies not in the implementation but rather in its analysis to establish an ecosystem that drives change in the processes of an organisation. Innovations in Big Data are propelled by utmost adherence to analytics. Organisations can implement the concepts of Big Data and benefit from the analytics by learning from the best practices and adapting those that have the potential for meaningful insight.

Big data and analytics solutions can improve the efficiency of assets and critical infrastructure and help organisations take a proactive approach to preventing or minimising costly outages. When assets are not functioning correctly, costs go up.  Data is significant in attending to the needs of a group, individuals and even organisational assets. Management and governance are efficiently exercised by aligning consumer attributes to the
data in action. Desired business outcomes are well-arrived at through significant, consistent and elaborate methods of data analysis. Creation, duplication and interpretation of data significantly put pressure on the planned outcomes of an organisation. It’s equally important to note that, without analytics, big data can be just noise. Running analytics on a wide range of existing data creates a vivid yet clear picture of what importance big data brings to an organisation.

Achieving a high level of operational excellence can be an overwhelming challenge. Big Data and Analytics solutions can enable companies to make significant improvements by helping them address their operations as an interconnected ecosystem as opposed to a collection of isolated departments. At the foundation of any company’s ecosystem is their customer base.

Consumers are demanding more from organisations, such as better products, personalised services and heightened quality of care. Quality in service and product delivery is a key driving factor in the actualisation of a company’s financial goals. Workplace expectations are also changing as most people need to make well-informed decisions so businesses can respond immediately. In exploring the potential of Big Data, an organisation needs to portray effectiveness in delivery which is essential in fulfilling consumers’ needs.

Big Data and analytics can help companies/organisations to streamline their existing operational processes to meet ever-changing customer needs.

Predictions aligned to the revolving sphere of Big Data, supported by ‘intense’ research, indicate that by 2020 the growth of all data – in digital formats – is forecasted to grow by more than 40,000 Exabytes. This growth attempts to bend much focus on the technological (methods) perspectives. This is also directed by the capabilities, information management and predictive analysis. Big Data is the new data source in the outlining, achievement and improvement of the constraints which govern the operation ability and functionality of select business entities. To maintain the operation ability of planned patterns, Big Data comes forth in order to attain set objectives.

Although the effective and smart use of big data is evolving, the potential to transform the way individuals look at information is not controversial. Big data exploration is an exercise in asking new and better questions as well as an opportunity to challenge conventional thinking about the collection and production of statistics.

In some cases, big data can allow policy analysis to move beyond aggregates and look at what lies beneath to better inform policy responses. Big data may allow better measurement of the effects of financial inclusion, access to financial services and economic growth. Electronic money systems, such as M-Pesa, are growing rapidly in developing economies and with them, opportunities to measure the effects of financial inclusion on poverty reduction, gender inequality, and economic growth.

Faster insights are one of the biggest promises of big data, because key variables – for example, financial and price data – can be observed almost instantaneously. To monitor economic and financial developments and to provide early-warning signals of stability risks, timely data is essential to statistics fit for policy use.

For a predictive maintenance solution to deliver relevant results, it must be able to capture and critically analyse structured data, unstructured data, resting data and most importantly – streaming data.

By now, many national and international statistical organisations have recognised that big data is not just a buzzword, but a potential strategic asset that requires a vision and a plan. Best practices for the building of lasting partnerships between official statistical agencies and data owners are being developed and tested, legal questions clarified, and best-use cases field-tested. Organisations learn that big data success is not about implementing one piece of technology, but about putting together an environment of people and processes that take the big data innovations forward and put them to work. Infrastructure spaces and big data sources continue to evolve and with them the possibilities, challenges, and limitations. Given the diverse skills and collaboration needed, big data projects are also an opportunity to break institutional silos.

Big data is not a static but a dynamic phenomenon, so the systems and networks generating it will continue to evolve, as well as the opportunities that big data offers, the challenges it poses and its statistical implications.

source: https://themarketmogul.com/big-data-business-growth/