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Can you recognize any of these people?
Source: Nvidia — A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
I bet you can’t as none of them are real. They don’t exist. They were generated using an AI (Artificial Intelligence) machine by Nvidia. Shocked???
Have you come across these below cool startups in education space?
Some ideas, for example, relive group studying with peer-to-peer learning or better read along subjects with your personal AI. Why can’t students crowd-source teachers to teach them? Aren’t they cool? But wait. Who are these startups which describe themselves with these sentences verbatim? None exist!!!
These were generated by our AI machine which was fed 1000s of education & “Future of Work” startup descriptions and now they generate new descriptions. We use this method for “unconventional” idea generation. You can feel free to pursue these ideas as they are machine generated.
These are two examples of people who seem real but don’t exist and information content that seems genuine but is not real. Humans can’t tell the difference.
People above were fake and their ideas too. Non-existent people can generate non-existent content. Recently one of the leading companies in AI, OpenAI decided to not make public such a fake news generator. See this article in Guardian, New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators. What harm will it cause?
In certain instances, multiple people have lost their lives due to the rapid spread of fake news. This July 2018 article in Guardian is a grisly reminder of the harm… “Police arrest 25 people in India after latest WhatsApp lynching”. Humans losing lives due to the rapid spread of information that is fake or doesn’t exist is a nightmare.
What does the future hold for humanity? Each of us has experienced the information explosion… the bombardment of tweets, feeds, videos, messages, etc. A simple way to think of the future is along 2 dimensions
Nature of data… how truthful/ trustworthy it is versus fake/ questionable quality
The pace of change… the rate at which this data and technology are bombarding us… steady (like it was a decade ago) versus rapid (like the last few years)
This gives 4 (2x2) scenarios as I have drawn below.
Think of the 1980s when libraries, books, and few newspapers were the best source of information. Curated and trustworthy they had a face behind it. The rate of information flow to us rapidly increased with the advent of the internet but in the 2000s it was still from trusted sources. Over the last decade or so the pace of change has increased but more disconcerting is the trend of examples described above. We have technology tools and artificial intelligence that can create non-existing people saying non-existent things. We are “leaving the past” and moving to a new scenario as shown below.
The pace of change is accelerating implying direction-ally we are headed to a scenario where we as humans can’t fathom the overload of information and will lose track of what is real and truthful as there will be a big dose of fake in that. People have provided multiple names to such a scenario when AI driven machines will make it overwhelming for humans to comprehend what is happening. Singularity is the most popular name. When mixed with fake news we will be misled and this is worse… I call it “humanity lost”. Today we have the “Chance To Intervene” to correct this course. That’s the box we are in today. Where should we go?
Rapid advances in technology are the beauty of humanity and are predicted to increase. How can humans comprehend the deluge? Think of an analogy from sports… when an action like a foul happens in football you refer to a slow-motion replay. It is too fast to make a decision in real-time and you could get it wrong. Hi-fidelity slow motion (a.k.a Slo-Mo) comes to rescue. Enjoy this 2014 Van Persie (Netherlands) goal against Spain below.
Should our intervention lead us to a Slo-Mo scenario? A scenario where irrespective of the rapid pace of change and potentially misleading content we can when required take a slo-mo look and take the right decision. Remember Slo-Mo is an effect when time seems to slow down… it actually has not. The game of life will then not become incomprehensible. Do we have a choice but not go to “Slo-Mo Scenario”?
Currently, there are three ways slo-mo is achieved.
Shoot it at higher speeds and play it at normal speed… remember The Matrix movie
Shoot at normal speed and play it slow… a lot of sports replays
Shoot at normal speed and fabricate digitally interpolated frames to smoothly transition between the frames that were actually shot… this requires intelligence
Our brain capacity is not increasing at the rate of technology change. This intelligence gap has to be bridged by other forms of Artificial Intelligence. A layer of AI on the internet and various platforms is needed to bring in slo-mo possibilities. It will be a “Slo-Mo AI scenario”.
What will a Slo-Mo AI scenario entail? Slo-mo AI needs to
de-clutter (See: AI to de-clutter life) the deluge of information
have the right reputation layers to build in trust
use reality (real-time) versus potentially virtual reality (for slow motion without disconnecting from reality) layering
layers that allow slo-mo like replay, multi-angle, interpolation, etc. These layers don’t exist today and need to be built grounds up… a multi-angle system would need data & AI models to be interconnected
and more
Possible. Will we?
“Your life is a miracle in slow motion”… Humanity’s potential miracle… A Slo-Mo AI Life