When I was 13 years old, I remember vividly, a geography lesson in which we looked at the way humans had settled in various locations geographically and the reasons why.
At the time personal computers and retail parks where just a notion and not yet a reality, but the teacher forewarned of how the future landscape may look.
He said that computers would rob people of their jobs and “retail citadels” (his phrase describing the retail park idea) would fragment society economically and the places in which they would live.
And, yes, what he spoke of came to fruition, computers became commonplace and impacted they way we worked and indeed added to leisure choices. The “citadels” of retail meant housing and transport changes often migrating people from the cities and villages they once graced with their well-earned cash.
Villages, towns and cities have become much less of a hub for people and many authorities are trying to juggle a rework on how they can economically bring people back to the often abandoned buildings and even historic areas.
Meanwhile, society is grappling with Climate change, Global Wars, Political unrest and the wake of a Worldwide pandemic. All of these impacting on peoples lives and way of life in as many ways as you can think of.
Now we have a new glitch already peeking its head over the horizon, perhaps its head and shoulders…Artificial Intelligence!
In the first instance, we can view this in the way we initially did, back when I was 13 years old in that geography lesson and thought that well it would make changes but we managed to adapt.
On the face of it, it seems like these are exciting additional tools for advancement and again to add to our leisure choices, but we really have to consider what the future will look like.
And when I say future, we are probably not talking about decades, as we did back when I was in school, AI’s advancement has already taken leaps and bounds.
At this point, I would point out that the concept of AI is definitely not a new one, Alan Turing began looking at machine learning as a possibility back in the 1940s and developed the Turing Test in 1950 (a test to establish whether a machine could exhibit human-like intelligence).
The road to developing Artificial Intelligence as we are now experiencing, has been chequered and experienced peaks and troughs of both interest in its viability and of course, the was and wane of financial investment.
Indeed over time, AI development and interest have experienced two “AI winters”, periods where belief, innovation and investment cooled, between 1973 to 1980 and 1987 to 1999.
Below is a timeline of AI’s more recent progress:
2000s
– 2005:Stanford’s robot “Stanley” wins the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles, sparking interest in self-driving cars.
– 2006:*Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov demonstrate deep belief networks, ushering in the era of deep learning.
2010s
– 2011: IBM Watson wins the game show Jeopardy!, beating human champions in a natural language quiz format.
– 2012: AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network, wins the ImageNet competition, drastically improving image recognition capabilities.
– 2014: Google acquires DeepMind, and its AI system DQN learns to play Atari games at superhuman levels.
– 2016: AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, defeats world champion Go player Lee Sedol, showcasing AI’s strength in complex strategic games.
– 2017: Transformers architecture is introduced by researchers at Google, revolutionizing natural language processing (NLP).
– 2018: OpenAI’s GPT-2, a powerful language model, is released, capable of generating human-like text.
– 2019: OpenAI’s GPT-3 is released, with even more advanced capabilities in text generation, reasoning, and language understanding.
2020s
– 2020: AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind, makes significant breakthroughs in protein folding, solving a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology.
– 2021: OpenAI releases Codex, an AI system based on GPT-3, capable of generating code and powering tools like GitHub Copilot.
– 2022: ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, gains mainstream attention for its advanced conversational capabilities.
– 2023: Advancements in AI ethics, fairness, and accountability become a focal point, as AI systems see increased integration in healthcare, education, and other critical sectors.
And so, today, we hear announcements about the latest amazing transition of AI, and AI that can see, hear, think and respond very much as a human…ChatGPT 4o.
Back in the 1950’s the U.S. Navy had been investing in the possibilities of machine learning in the hope of cracking a translating program for Russian into English.
The U.S. Navy, at that time, at that time stated:
“The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”
Well, we got there guys, in fact, the translation function was already in process but the Google Translate we are all now familiar with hit the shelves in 2006.
We have to marvel at some of the innovations AI has brought to the world:
Innovations Mastered by AI:
1. Natural Language Processing (NLP):
– Human-like understanding and generation of text (e.g., translation, summarisation, and question-answering).
2. Computer Vision:
– Image and video recognition, object detection, and facial recognition (e.g., medical imaging, autonomous vehicles).
3. Autonomous Systems:
– Self-driving cars, drones, and robotics (e.g., logistics, manufacturing).
4. Strategic Game Playing:
– Mastery of board games like chess and Go, and real-time strategy games (e.g., StarCraft).
5. Predictive Analytics:
– Forecasting and trend analysis in finance, weather, and supply chain management.
6. Healthcare Applications:
– Diagnostics, personalised medicine, and drug discovery (e.g., analysis of medical images, prediction of disease outbreaks).
7. Creative AI:
– Generation of art, music, and poetry (e.g., neural style transfer, AI-generated compositions).
8. Speech Recognition and Generation:
- Voice assistants (e.g., Siri, Alexa), transcription services, and language models that can hold conversations.
So, now, I wonder what my learned geography teacher would make of where we are now and what lies in wait for mankind.
Is the future bright?
Are heading for the land of milk and honey where no one needs to work in the future?
How will society work?
For me I see a world which echoes the Feudal System introduced in the UK in 1066 by William the Conqueror. The system was basically based on those who owned land and those who endured a service relationship with the land owners.
In the future, with a large percentage of the working of civilisation being undertaken by AI, those that control those processes will be the “landowners” as such…it won’t actually be about owning land for humans to work on as even these activities will no doubt be done by intelligent robots.
As for money…well that may be interesting as to how the powers that be manage that side of life as we are already on the brink of the digi-dollar.
I also see people opting out of this automated society and heading for the hills. Setting up their own communities built on a working relationship with each other, harnessing practical skills to benefit everyone. A bartering ethos may be somewhat old school but perhaps more desirable than a society predominantly based on complete control.
Clearly at this point, we do not know what it will look like, but a complete overhaul of the “system” will have to be done. It is also hard to gauge the timeline but given the speed at which the AI is developing it may well be sooner rather than later.
Whether you are a Prepper or not, these are times when you need to look at the bigger picture and get a sense of how different life could be in our lifetime…hopefully, we will have clear choices about it, but I encourage you to keep informed and think on what choices YOU want to make in life.
P.S. I failed geography, I did a piece on “The Deforestation of the Appalachia”… but stated it was in Canada…oops…perhaps I was dreaming about robot waiters, self-drive cars and a future where no-one needed to work again!