AI as a new atomic bomb: the weapon of future

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an atomic bomb of future. The one who owns it - rules the everything. Companies that work to create AI become a rival to the countries that own everything, including atomic bombs.

While some countries fight to have own atomic bombs (Iran?) and others try to threat others with their own bombs (Russia?), they seem like outdated countries that live in the past. The future is not in atomic bombs, the future is in intelligence that could control them. Intelligence that could create new technologies, new approaches, new weapon and new future is much more important, much more strong than "some" bombs.

You cannot fight someone who is smarter, sees and knows more than you. You cannot win when all your steps already pre-calculated, and you play in someone else game.

However, there are still some large gap between current state of technologies and real AI. It seems we are not able to scale existing technologies enough to produce superhuman intelligence. Not clear if existing algorithms and approaches are able to be scale to that level though.

Google Glasses, AI and shadow copy

Last week I had some roadtrip and was passing a few interesting points. I wanted to add a note to visit that places in the future, but couldn't as was driving a car. And I started dreaming on how it would be awesome if you just could add a note using your voice. But I'm lazy. Would be even better if it could be added to the backlog of places to visit just by making thought command. But I'm too lazy. Thinking about visiting some place is good, but need to make a specific command in my thoughts - go and visit this place later. Not ideal yet. Would be better if there would be some invisible assistant that could do that for me. That would know me as good as I do. Who would know what I might be thinking about, who would understand my desires even when it's not clear enough for me yet. Some AI assistant, that would know that I might be thinking how nice it would be to visit that shop with a fresh seafood, because I love seafood so much.

But how can any AI be smart enough? How could any AI understand me so well? Reading thoughts? Yes, but that is such hard thing now (well, yet possible someday). But if there would be a device that could see what I see, hear what I say and what others say, then it would be able to learn and understand me someday. And then I realized that I just described Google Glasses.

The more I thought about this AI assistant the more I understood that it won't be an assistant anymore. It would be my digital shadow copy. Able to think like me. That knows what I know, because has vision and can hear - more than 90% of information sources the human uses. And there would be a company that would own my mental copy. The company that could ask my copy if I would prefer to buy product A or B, or what am I going to search in nearest future. You know, the company like Google could even already have search results for me ready way before I decide to do a search.

And what about ads? Are you kidding me? There is no ads anymore! No one needs ads. Company knows what I want to buy already. It just shows me what I want and need to buy already.

How good it could be? Well, you don't know but I eat 1 banana every day. But my digital copy would know that for sure. I have only 2 bananas left in my fridge. So, my shadow copy knows that I need to buy another bunch of bananas soon. And it buys it for me. My bananas are delivered in a day. No shortage, no rush, no efforts from me. I don't even need to think or worry about that anymore.

This is something that changes basically everything in our lives. And changes are good.

Human Memory

I've read an awesome book recently - The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. I must say that didn't expect much of this book. My thought was "just another book for designers on how to create usable things". There was however something pushing me to read this book, maybe because  I've read about it in the In the Plex; book was references as the one that influenced Google's founders. Well, now I can understand why. Even thought the book is mostly about trivial things that everyone should understand and know. In fact, it's not true. Not everyone understand and know. I didn't. So many openings about regular things, views from different perspectives, inspirational rules etc.

There are many topics that I liked in this book. But the chapter named "To Err is Human" maybe the most favorite for me. Not only because I make so many mistakes and errors all over the time by myself, and it's nice to understand how this works (and how I work). But because author gives very good explanation on how human memory and brains work.

I made some notes during reading this book, and decided to share some of the them that are related to how human memory works. I also was thinking how this apply to the AI. And made some interesting openings for myself too.

So here are my notes...