How AI can Bring on a Second Industrial Revolution
One of the chief tendencies of today is to “make things smarter and smarter”. Kevin Kelly, publisher of The Inevitable and founder of the All-Species Foundation, calls it cognification, more widely known as artificial intelligence – AI.
In his latest TED Talk, he explains why he thinks that mass AI implementation & adoption is going to be one of the most influential development trends in our society, in the next 20 years.
In his opinion, people have overlooked three important aspects related to this trend:
- People have different types of intelligence – emotional, visual, spatial – all grouped together in clusters
Starting from this idea, Kevin Kelly explains that when making machines, they should be engineered following the same pattern, where certain machines are smarter, in some specific areas, than humans, such as the GPS in spatial navigation. Kelly sees this as “making alien intelligences” and he strongly believes that these new intelligences are going to “help us think differently, because thinking differently is the engine of creation and wealth and new economy.”
- Using AI to make a second Industrial Revolution
Today we are able to distribute artificial power on wires, on a grid to every home, factory, farmstead, and make use of it just by simply plugging in a cord. With this new formula, ‘X + AI’, Kevin Kelly claims that everything that is electrified can become ‘cognified’. This way, a simple electric pump can become a smart pump, or a 250-horsepower car can have 250 minds.
- Through embodying AIs, we can create robots
These bots will not only be doing many of our tasks, but they’ll create other very different tasks, engendering new kinds of jobs. The future successful team will be comprised of both humans and bots.
“The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it’s not an AI, it’s the team…they’re different, they’re utility and they are going to be something we work with rather than against.”
By fully grasping the depth of these three aspects, people will start understanding and embracing AI a lot better, and in 20 years’ time, the internet and AI will not be the same.
Kevin Kelly, Publisher of the Whole Earth Review, Executive Editor at Wired Magazine, Founder of the All-Species Foundation and author of The Inevitable – is also a photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
Video source: K. Kelly (2016), How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution, TED Talks
Tags: Development, Multimedia, trends
