Slimmeren (*): Cognifying our world is a very big deal, and it’s happening now

02-Cognifying (1:04) (105 views)

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OUK0LBiloQE

“Wanneer deze zich ontwikkelende Artificiële Intelligentie komt zal haar alomtegenwoordigheid haar aan het oog onttrekken”

Alomtegenwoordige Kunstmatige intelligentie (AI)
It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous (alomtegenwoordige) artificial intelligence. To begin with, there’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter. Even a small amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiviness (effectiviteit) to a whole new level. The advantages gained from cognifying (slimmer maken) inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialization. (p. 29)

De ‘commons’ van het web
Ideally, this additional (deze toegevoegde) intelligence should be not just cheap, but free. A free AI, like the commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force we can imagine and would pay for itself in no time. (p. 29)

Miljarden, embedded en losjes met elkaar verbonden
However, the first genuine AI will not be birthed (geboren worden) in a stand-alone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the net. It will be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded and loosely connected. It will be hard to tell where its thoughts begin and ours end. Any device that touches this networked AI will share – and contribute to – its intelligence. A lonely off-the-grid AI cannot learn as fast, or as smartly, as one that is plugged into 7 billion human minds, plus quintillions of online transistors, plus hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, plus the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization. So the network itself will cognify (slimmer worden) into something that uncannily (griezelig) keeps getting better. (p. 29-30)

AI versnelt alle aan de gang zijnde disrupties: het is de oerkracht
When this emerging (opkomende) AI arrives, its very ubiquity (alomtegenwoordigheid) will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores (alledaagse klusjes), but it will be faceless, unseen. We will be able to reach this disturbed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online), it will be difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual (afgesproken) agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?
The arrival of artificial intelligence accelerates (versnelt) all the other disruptions I describe in this book; it is the ur-force in our future. We can say with certainty that cognification (het slimmer worden) is inevitable, because it is already here. (p. 30)

Neem X en voeg AI toe
Now everything that we formerly electrified we will cognify. There is almost nothing we can think of that cannot be made new, different, or more valuable by infusing it with some extra IQ. In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it. (p. 33)

Een eindeloze rij
The list of Xs is endless. The more unlikely the field, the more powerful adding AI will be. () Here are other unlikely realms (rijken) waiting to be cognitively enhanced (cognitief versterkt):
music – laundry (kleren), marketing, real estate (onroerend goed), nursing (verpleging), construction, ethics, toys, sports, knitting (breien) (Who knows? But it will come!

Cognifying our world is a very big deal, and it’s happening now. (p. 35-36)

Three recent breakthroughs have unleashed the long awaited arrival of artificial intelligence.
1. Cheap Parallel Computaion
2. Big Data
3. Better Algorithms (p. 38-39)

AI zal steeds beter worden
This perfect storm of cheap parallel computation, bigger data, and deeper algorithms generated the 60-years-in-the-making overnight success of AI. And this convergence (samensmelting) suggests that as long as these technological trends continue – and there’s no reason they won’t – AI will keep improving. (p. 40)

Onafwendbaar op weg naar een oligarchie?
As it does, this cloud-based AI will become an increasingly ingrained (ingeworteld) part of everyday life. But it will come at a price. Cloud computing empowers (versterkt) the law of increasing returns (wet van de toenemende opbrengsten), sometimes called the network effect, which holds that the value of a network increases (groeit) much faster as it grows bigger. The bigger the network, the more attractive it is to new users, which makes it even bigger and thus more attractive, and so on. A cloud that serves AI will obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on. Once a company enters this vicious 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. (p. 40)

Niet op een menselijke manier
The kind of thinking done by the emerging AIs today is not like human thinking. While they can accomplish tasks – such as playing chess, driving a car, describing the contents of a photograph – that we once believed only humans could do, they don’t do it in a humanlike fashion. (p. 43)

Slim zijn is niet genoeg
In a superconnected world, thinking different is the source of innovation and wealth. Just being smart is not enough. Commercial incentives will make industrial-strength AI ubiquitous (alomtegenwoordig), embedding cheap smartness into all that we make. But a stronger payoff will come when we start inventing new kinds of intelligences and entirely new ways of thinking. (p. 43)

Denken dat wij niet kunnen
The types of artificial minds we are making now and will make in the coming century will be designed to perform specialized tasks, and usually tasks that are beyond what we can do. Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think. (p. 46-47)

Antwoorden leren accepteren van aliens
Today, many scientific discoveries require hundreds of human minds to solve, but in the near future there may be classes of problems so deep that they require hundreds of different species of minds to solve. This will take us to a cultural edge because it won’t be easy to accept the answers from an alien intelligence. (p. 47)

AI could just as well stand for “alien intelligence”. We have no certainty we’ll contact extraterrestial beings from one of the billion earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we have almost 100 percent certainty that we’ll manufacture an alien intelligence by then. (p. 48)

ET & AA : wat is een mens?
When we face synthetic aliens, we’ll encounter the same benefits and challenges that we expect from contact with ET. They will force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be: Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different – to create alien intelligences. We should really call AIs “AAs”, for “artificial aliens”. (p. 48)

Een permanente identiteitscrisis?
As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender – we are not only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music or invent a matheatical law – will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades – indeed, perhaps the next century – in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased (toegenomen) productivity or an economy of abundance (overvloed) or a new way of doing science – although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are. (p. 49)

Overal robots
The alien minds that we’ll pay the most attention to in the next few years are the ones we give bodies to. We call them robots. They will come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations – manifesting in diverse species, so to speak. Some will roam like animals, but many wil be immobile like plants or diffuse like a coral reef. Robots are already here, quietly. Very soon louder, smarter ones are inevitable. The disruption they cause will touch our core.
Imagine that seven out of ten working Americans got fired romorrow. What would they all do? (p. 49)

Een race MET machines
This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery (sleur), will be handed over to robots by the accountants (boekhouders). (p. 60)

Laat de robots onze banen maar overnemen, opdat we kunnen (gaan) dromen …
We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more humans than we were.

It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters. (p. 60)

* COGNIFY is een niet bestaand woord. Het gaat om (iets of iemand) slimmer maken; of slimmer laten worden. Ik kies als vertaling voor ‘SLIMMEREN’, om in stijl te blijven. Elk van de twaalf hoofdstuktitels bestaat immers uit een werkwoord. 

Twaalf technologische krachten die onze toekomst zullen vormen
01. Becoming (worden) – 03. Flowing (stromen) – 04. Screening (kijken) – 05. Accessing (toegangen) – 06. Sharing (delen) – 07. Filtering (filteren) – 08. Remixing (remixen) – 09. Interacting (interacteren) – 10. Tracking (tracken) – 11. Questioning (vragen) – 12. Beginning (beginnen)    

Citaat 376 (woensdag 3 augustus 2016)
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