AI, Machine Intelligence, Thinking Machines and Smart Machines

A robot with rudimentary social skills
(Kismet robot@MIT  Museum)

Today we are experiencing a global media tsunami around the topic of AI and machines that can think, supersede the human brain, replace our jobs and even being a threat to the humankind (ref great minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk).

Is it true, are we on the brink of developing and releasing machines that can think for themselves? Machines that are truly intelligent and that has a mind of itself?

If you ask the vast majority of people working in the tech industry, I guess you will have a vague and uncertain answer, but if you ask the top notch research people that are working on AI and developing cognitive systems, you will have a load and clear no, not in any foreseeing future, if ever! (ref “What to Think About Machines That Think” edited by John Brockman):

The media just dont get it, they are mixing all terms and definitions and focuses on imaginary robots that supposedly can out-think the human. What we do have experienced, for many decades already, are programmable machines that replaces boring, tedious and simple jobs by ticket machines, road tax systems, ATMs etc and lately more advanced and user-friendly internet banking systems replacing thousands of bank tellers and soon even traders (already happening), accountants and real estate agents.

So, in short, what happens is that the machines are getting more resources and capabilities to process more data, i.e. big data. The finance industry is a good example where we will see more and more usage of big data being processed by powerful machines with the help of machine learning. The finance analysts are spending most of their time investigating data for potential investments which are then fed into potential trading opportunities. The analysts are thus processing as much data as possible before an investment decision is taken.

A computer will be able to process much more data much faster and reach a recommended trading that in itself easily can be automated. Similar use-case you will find in life science and diagnostics. Computers with machine learning algorithms will be able to process much more data (medical journals) much faster and reach a recommended diagnosis almost instantly.

But is this thinking machines? Is it even Artificial Intelligence?

Machine learning is basically about training a prediction model enabling it to refine its prediction by providing training data. This training is an exhausting process as you need to train the model to understand all possible correlations of the data points. In the case of the financial analyst, we need to train our stock trading model all the correlations between the financial data points that the analyst would claim are relevant for the potential trading. This is an exhausting process and thus this is the main reason why we still have human financial analysts and traders, but that will not continue for long as gradually machines will be trained by machine learning to accommodate this exhausting process. But still, all these “thinking” machines are just trained extensions of our human minds.

These machines and their software are not about to leap beyond us intellectually, much less turn us into their slaves. They are simply just doing the instructed tasks much faster. 
I realise that you could argue that we are already dependant (slaves) of our handheld smart devices like iPhone etc, making us into trans-human and thus maybe there is a short step from these “smart” devices to a dependency of the “thinking” machines that act as financial analysts, traders, real estate traders etc., but is this scary? No, but very beneficial and cost efficient.

Do we face singularity - the moment when the machines surpasses our intelligence? No, not any time soon, the fact remains, these machines are going to continue being dependent on the human programmers for any foreseeable future - however that also includes the potential of programmers (human) making errors and introduce bugs that could have some serious consequences.

Einstein is quoted as saying “Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe”

What if the machines do the programming? Are we able to teach the machines programming? Not really, but we may use machine learning to assist the machines to do some extensions of its own algorithm and as there is research going on in deep learning with neural networks scaled twelve layers deep, there might be some interesting development in the near future. Deep learning has already revolutionised object- and speech recognition and achieved significant progress in melanoma recognition in dermoscopy images, but is this silicon-brain a thinking machine?

Despite these amazing progress, what about the remaining capabilities of our carbo-brain? Our carbo-brain have billions of neutrons in cortical hierarchies ten layers deep and it has the capabilities to, not only acquiring knowledge, but has a mind, thought, experiences and senses.

“The gap between our best computers and the brain of a child is the gap between a drop of water and the Pacific Ocean” (Carlo Rovelli, Theoretical Physicist)

And just one last point, these “Intelligent Machine Systems" are often referred to as Cognitive which is also a bit provocative given that the adjective is defined as “of or relating to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgement, and reasoning” - and I don’t think any of these software systems fits the bill - at the best, they are Kismet robots with rudimentary skills.

Trends and super trends

1. Hydrogen fuel cells with smaller batteries will replace today's [huge] battery powered cars as well as hybrid vehicles - hydrogen fuel cells are really disruptive to petrol, diesel and electric cars, trucks and buses. Todays electric vehicles (EV) is, hopefully, just an intermediate stage as these huge batteries are not sustainable both from a mineral mining (cobalt) and pollution (CO2) point-of-view: 
   

   
   

   • Published in the journal Ingeniøren, the Swedish meta-study, which analyses and summarises studies completed so far in the field, found that around 150 to 200kg of CO2 equivalents (environmental impact equivalent to that of the release of CO2) are produced for every kilowatt hour (kWh) storage capacity of electric car batteries.
     
     

   • For example, taking two electric cars, the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf, which have 100kWh and 30kWh batteries respectively in Denmark, the study says these capacities are equivalent to 17.5 tonnes and 5.3 tonnes of CO2 being generated respectively.

   •  To put this in perspective, a round-trip from Stockholm to New York, by International Civil Aviation Organisation figures, releases around 600kg (0.6 tonnes) of CO2 into the atmosphere. In Germany, annual emissions of CO2 are currently almost 10 tonnes per person.

   • Therefore, the study has calculated that a fossil fuel vehicle can currently drive for more than eight years before it reaches the same environmental impact of a Tesla. For the Nissan Leaf, with its smaller capacity battery, this figure comes in at three years

   
   
   Every battery being used in today's electric vehicles are heavily depending on Cobalt which is a rare metal and Cobalt mining happens in Africa, predominantly Congo, thousands of miners in Congo dig by hand. Children, too.
    
2. Nanotechnology will resolve multiple material issues like replacing expensive platinum in hydrogen fuel cells. 
   
   
3. SO business based in US and Europe are being disrupted on price and performance by [Indian low cost companies](http://fortuneindia.com/2014/october/india-in-the-era-of-disruption-1.3290). I[ndian companies with Indian executives](https://qz.com/429017/can-indias-it-services-companies-weather-the-perfect-storm/) are much more cost-efficient than European or US based companies with high cost executive layers despite their “updated” business models with deployment of Indian infrastructure operation. These European or US companies needs higher profit margins to cover their expensive executives and also the running cost of their Indian infrastructure operation is higher (predominantly due to more people) than their Indian competitors simply because they do not know the culture and how to manage Indians efficiently.
   ---
   > The larger and more successful a company, the greater the risk of complacency. When a company is sitting on billions of dollars of cash, fat margins and good market share, it’s hard to create a sense of urgency and paranoia in the organisation and its shareholders. /Quote from QUARTZ India./
    

   

   Image Credit: Nilanjan Das Image Credit: ; Bandeep Singh

   
   
   
4. CRISPR-Cas9 is for fixing diseases and faulty genes in our DNA, people will live a longer healthy life, but will it also create superhumans? 
   

   

   Image credit: Royal Society of Biology

   
   
5. Silicon for General Purpose computing , Quantum qubits for special workloads. Pushing the limits of semiconductor technology (5 nanometer technology is just around the corner) is more important than ever as companies race to develop the latest applications for cognitive computing, cloud computing, and IoT. 
   

   

   Photograph of a quantum chip constructed by D-Wave Systems Inc

   

   IBM Research Alliance’s 5nm transistor (Photo credit: IBM)

   
   
6. Bio transistors - DNA transistor for sequencing:
   

   

   Photo credit IBM

   
   
7. Carbon (humans) vs Silicon and algorithms and [python] machine learning - silicon
   algorithms and machine learning will surpass humans in many areas. 
   
   
8. Labor vs cognitive robots - cognitive robots will replace many cognitive jobs, not only pure
   labor jobs. 
   
   
9. Future jobs are in microbiology, mathematics (algorithms) and machine learning. 
   
   
10. [Bio]IoT will replace smart phones. 
    
    
11. Wearable glasses will replace screens. 
    
    
12. Chat bots like Alexa, Siri, Mitsuku, Zo, Rose etc all gets cloud based and cognitive and will be
    in all households and on your “arm”. 
    
    
    
    
13. Algorithms will be the most valuable asset to companies in near future 
    
    
14. All social media data will not be encrypted and available to the authorities - internet is truly 
    “open”. 
15. Blockchain - superior digital ledger system
16. Azure Stack. fully integrated compute, storage and networking clustered Azure certified infrastructure (a single Azure Stack is a single region containing a single scale unit consisting of 4-12 servers) that provide “private cloud” services as well as hybrid cloud GW to public Azure. 
    
17. Humans has already transformed into [Transhuman] by use of their smart devices, i.e. these Transhuman has become completely dependent on their smart devices in all their daily tasks and consequently they become completely “lost” when their smart devices are left behind, lost or without power. Auxiliary power devices are becoming the next “big thing” and is selling in large numbers to ensure a never ending power supply. In parallel, the media and society at large is becoming more and more focused on AI and its possible impact on automation and jobs, but no-one is questioning the Transhuman and their smart devices.

Dark Matter

This is a very exciting thriller, but it does not stop with just being a thriller if you have the slightest interest in Quantum Mechanics and the multiverse.
I dont know, but I guess there are not many thrillers out there with the 5 D probability space as the backdrop. This may sound complicated and yes, it is, but this story makes it much easier to comprehend.
I guess most of you are familiar with the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat (see box below pasted from Wikipedia). This thought experiment is often featured in theoretical discussions of  quantum mechanics, specifically multiverse and quantum superposition - and the neat thing about this book is that it actually uses quantum superposition to give you an exciting story and multiverse travel without making it complicated but giving you food for thought and lots of good philosophical discussions...
Enjoy!!!



The Schrödinger's cat experiment:

Miss Peregrin's home for peculiar children

This exciting fantasy story is composed based on a collection of old photographs obtained from flea markets and friends. Pretty creative approach and so is the story. Interesting is also that this is the debut book by the author Ransom Riggs.

This is very entertaining and exciting reading about these peculiar children - and so very well written, I am not surprised at all that one of my favourite film directors, Tim Burton, found this story so exciting that he decided to make a full feature motion picture based on this book.
Better credit to any debut author and the story is hard to get if one appreciates Tim Burton movies like Beetlejuice, Nigthmare before Cristmas (stop motion movie), Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride (also stop motion movie) and lately Alice Through the Looking Glass - and many more, but now also Miss Peregrine's home for Peculiar Children.
I actually enjoyed Tim Burton's movie before I read the book, but I realise that you can actually enjoy both in either sequence as Tim Burton has invented his own climax of the story, but still very true to the characters in the book as well as their capabilities.

Enjoy!!!

Conclave

Robert Harris' Conclave is a bit of a chameleon, its not necessarily what you expect when you pickup the book from the bookstore or library - at least it was not to me, especially because Robert Harris is being presented as one of the thriller authors of our time etc. 

This is  not at all to his or his book "conclave" discredit, its just that it may set some expectations that may not be fulfilled. I started to read this book with the expectation of a thriller, well it all depends on what each one us defines as a thriller, but if I tell you that this book is all about cardinals holding a conclave to elect a new pope in the Vatican - and thats pretty much it, I guess I will discourage lots of readers - unfairly!! Unfairly because this is a very well written story, the research done is exceptionally good and the result is definitely one of the best books I have read for a very long time - despite it is only about a bunch cardinals in gigantic segregated holy place called the Vatican... which would normally not catch my interest, but this story made me love the main characters, the secrecy and the close companionship between the men... and one or two women.. Given the context of the story one would need some surprises and cliff hangers to keep the interest. Robert Harris is not necessarily such a big cliff hanger master, but he does not need to because his story telling is an all cliff hanger story telling with just the right amount of surprises all the way till the last page... so, great book, great reading!!

Hybrid Cloud 2.0

Almost two years ago Gartner and other analysts and market research companies predicted that nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017 – that's just two years from now (and it did not happen - note of Sept 2020). 

Only a year ago, the interest of a hybrid cloud solution was still very high: 

So, will it happen? Well it all depends on how we define hybrid cloud. Installing a cloud orchestrator may very well account for a hybrid cloud deployment – for some, and in that perspective I am sure it will happen. But of course the concept of hybrid cloud is much more than implementing the cloud orchestrator and by the way, the current technology is still not mature and thus not able to do much more than provisioning a virtual server from a few well-defined providers – at the best!

Interesting is also that the hybrid cloud vision and target capabilities for such solutions are also changing. A year ago we focused on the APIs that is needed to integrate across a large number of heterogeneous providers and enterprises with a cloud orchestrator in order to achieve the flexibility of moving discrete workloads across different providers. Today we are still not able to this, at the best we can do something similar with one or two providers, but not at any large scale. So, what is happening? Are we not seeing the APIs emerging that enable heterogeneous providers and enterprises integrate? No we are not – and a good reason is the emerging and strong drive of OpenStack:

OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. OpenStack works with popular enterprise and open source technologies making it ideal for heterogeneous infrastructure.

Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem, and users seeking commercial support can choose from different OpenStack-powered products and services in the Marketplace.

The software is built by a thriving community of developers, in collaboration with users, and is designed in the open at our Summits.

Only this last year basically all the major cloud providers have issued OpenStack compliance statements or announced a strategy to achieve such compliancy within a short time.

In parallel the hybrid cloud vision is also changing, its no longer a target to only integrate heterogeneous providers and enterprises, but indeed to establish the capability of provisioning arbitrary resources from any OpenStack-based provider, but the ultimate goal is; not only consume resources, but also contribute resources to “any” other consumer!!

This is pretty ambitious, but none the less very interesting. This means that any enterprise that has invested and built their private cloud also can contribute resources to the “world” of hybrid cloud consumers. There are of course “small” issues like ability to invoice for the consumed resources. OpenStack whom predicted this “World Wide Cloud” vision, has already started the billing discussion that might also include resources like applications - so maybe enterprises will have a new business opportunity as SaaS providers…

Ken Follett's Century Trilogy

Despite huge successes like the Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, I was a bit reluctant to start on Ken Follett's ambitious Century Trilogy as I expected something of a thriller style story telling, but that was not what I found opening Fall of Giants, the first book in the trilogy, on the contrary I found myself meeting a Welsh coal miner family and the 13 year old Dave who had his first day in the black and hot coal-mine far down below the ground… not much of a thriller, more like a socio-political story… but things changed rapidly and the author easily caught my attention as he quickly started to weave the socio-political day-to-day life of this small Welsh family into the big events of our European history.

This is where Ken Follett really is impressive and ingenious, he ambitiously tells us the history of Europe, Russia and North America by adding a second layer on top consisting of five families, two in the UK, one in each of Russia, Germany and North America.

In the beginning these families are just any families in each geography as the historical events takes all the readers attention as the author brings in so much details and insight into [unknown] persons and events that caused and orchestrated the big events like the first world war and the Russian revolution. But already in Winter of the World, the second book of the trilogy, you realise that the author has actually planned in details the way he is weaving each of these families into all of the historical events enabling him to tell the history from “inside” as opposed as a historian. This is very cleverly done and makes it easy to stay focused throughout all the almost 3000 pages. By the time you start on Edge of Eternity, the third and last book of the trilogy, you are equally interested to learn what happens to these families as to the development of the history itself – and this is again the cleverness of the author because most of us are much more up to date on our most recent history and thus to keep the attention of the reader the families and their destinies becomes the driving force… fascinating and very, very clever.

On more thing, in a recent TV interview Ken Follett told us about his admiration of his wife, who is obviously a strong feminist, and this possibly explains why all his female characters are so strong – yet another reason to read this amazing trilogy!