08/31/2017
AI is the center of attention not only in the tech community, but also in media, entertainment, religion, and government. Amidst all of the hype amongst startups and AI enthusiasts, some believe that there is a lot of potential for machine learning to solve seriously complex and critical problems.
Companies around the world are focused on algorithms to analyze patterns of behavior, lifestyle, health and biometric data, social activity, personal preferences, relationships, etc. Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Apple already use intelligent systems to improve our shopping experiences, provide all sorts of assistance, and analyze our communication on social media. Soon, the level of immersion of AI into our lives will be dramatic, with limitless possibilities to collect data from all sorts of devices and items which you use on daily basis. AI will improve our work environment, task management, and hiring processes. For instance Salesforce is working on its artificial intelligence service called Einstein that will simplify tasks and help employees to work more efficiently.
Hiring processes and recruitment are also being refined. AI optimizes hiring systems by focusing only on skills, domain expertise, and knowledge and eliminating some personal information, such as gender, race and age. For example, companies like Beamery and ThisWay Global use machine learning software to enhance matching systems with the skills of the candidates required by an employer’s requirements.
In the future, machines may even analyze your existence and your mental state. With better-than-human accuracy, AI can analyze test results to predict and prevent diseases. Some of the leaders in this field are iCarbonX and Zebra Medical Systems. The deeper the Artificial Intelligence is immersed in our lives the more intelligent it will become. It's hard to believe, though, in a decade or two AI may solve the human quest for potential biological immortality by analyzing biometric data and huge libraries of medical images.
Not only will your personal data be used by machine learning algorithms, but also data from your partners, pets, cars, boats, your smart home, and all of your surroundings. This all has the potential to create a new hyper-modern lifestyle - a solipsistic existence as it were - within a completely transparent environment. Transparency in this case, is not just transparent to other humans, but also means being constantly monitored and analyzed by these ever-watchful algorithms and intelligent systems.
Perhaps in the future, we'll have AI mentors who analyze our patterns of behavior and help to make you happier, and give you more free time to spend with your family and friends. We might agree to share everything, just to make sure that it will solve all our problems we created on this planet. The AI will structure our lives differently, adding free time for other activities, more time to learn something new, read more, create something good and useful.
And yet a part of me still believes that sometimes being in the wrong helps us to find the right. It helps us to evaluate and compare. Maybe we have to go through difficulties and make mistakes - to value every minute of free time, maybe we have to be busy and miserable. When you have too much time on your hands, finding motivations might just be another problem. And when we enter this realm of the human experience, I think that we'll find what many people have discovered throughout history - you can't lead a horse to water, no matter how many algorithms are involved.
Article and illustration by Alena Starostina
