Artificial Intelligence - Opportunity or Threat?

What will be the next thing where robots are replacing humans? I think social media influencers are at high risk.

There has been discussion if artificial intelligence (AI) will be a threat for the mankind or not. For example Bill Gates, Elon Musk are worried. On the other hand Eric Horvitz thinks that AI will not pose a threat to humans. I am sure that development of technology will continue. It is hard to predict how AI and other technology will evolve in longer term and even harder to see what it will mean for us, for our work and so. Here is one good article describing why it is so difficult to predict.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a movie published in 2001 and pretty good example about predicting the future. The movie tell a story about a super intelligent robot that looks like a children, acts like a children and wants to be a real children. This happens late of 21st century. There are many human like robots and police has means to detect who is a robot and who is a real human. At the end of the movie humans are disappeared from the earth and robots have different kind of shape and means of transportation. I remember when first time watching the movie in 2001 it was easy to see one thing that has already changed. However the movie can still be a good prediction about the future with AI, or the future may be totally different. It is very hard to say if artificial intelligence will some day be smarter than humans when all aspects of life and science is taken into account.

If we consider only limited tasks we already see that AI is better than the best human in the world. Easy examples are for example computer playing chess, systems controlling production in a factory, mobile phone that can read a map and guide you to the destination anywhere in the world (replaces maps), an automatic digital telephone center, robots are buying and selling listed shares,  and so on. In some cases humans could also to the tasks but AI or computers are much more cost effective. There is plenty of examples how automation, computers or artificial intelligence has replaced humans or are doing that in near future.

So it is a good question if AI will threat the whole mankind. Before we know the answer to that we have to think what AI and robotization will mean for the distribution of income. In many cases it will be only positive thing when robots can take care of dangerous and boring tasks and we can concentrate on more interesting work and having fun. People can have fun if they get enough money for food, housing and entertainment. The big question is how to get the money if there will be jobs only for robots and small part of the people?

Owners the robots will make some money for sure. They will also need to hire some people to develop and build the robots and keeping those up and running. Robots will make cut costs down. For example travelling could be cheaper thanks to mobile phone applications that will make it possible easily ask who wants to offer lowest cost accommodation or taxi service for you. No need to pay big money needed for the salaries of the people working in hotel companies. Instead you could find someone who offers a room and sightseeing free for you because he or she just loves to meet foreigner people.

The interesting thing is to predict which jobs will be next replaced by robots. My favorite bet is social media influencers. For example in Twitter you can easily see different kind of lists of the top influencers and different kind of studies how to effectively use social media. You need to make your posts at certain time of the day. You should be active. You should retweet to thank people who mentions you in their tweets. You should have a picture in your tweet. You can get more followers if you follow other people. You should not spam. Many simple rules that can be taken care by a computer software or robot. Even writing 140 characters of good enough English is not impossible for a robot. Using other social media services to share things published in the net is not much more difficult even if the postings can be longer than 140 characters.  I don't know if it is legal to make a social media account and let a robot use it. I don't know how effectively the social media companies are fighting against robots. Will it be possible that some day artificial social media influencers made by some digital marketing company will be ranked high in the top influencers lists? If yes, will the marketing company sell low cost licences to interested companies and enable big cost savings in marketing?

Another interesting area for robots are law offices. It will not be easy to replace lawyers by robots, but I think robots can easily help a lot. Only thing needed is a robot that can read and search law texts. One example was shown in a Swedish TV series Hubots - Real Humans.

When robots will be able to read and write English text, media companies will be able to use robots to draft news and newspaper articles. Journalists in Finland does not need be worried because Finnish is small and difficult language and it will take longer time before robots will be able to do that properly.

Benefits of virtual reality

There has been a lot of discussion around Google glasses lately. One of the articles making a good overview is here. Google has stopped selling the glasses, but continues development. In general, the idea of data classes remains very fascinating.

Data glasses will enable many interesting applications in industry. Think that you will see the real actual situation and on top of that some other information in the same view. It is possible to see a lot of relevant information without a need to use your both hands to take your smartphone and find the info from the net  or carry some papers with you. For example a farmer could see cultivation plan when planting the seedlings. With GPS it would be possible to get straight lines. A technician installing a paper machine will be able to see what is the next step and how to correctly install the next part. The technician will not need to carry papers and he can use his both hands all the time for the real work. It will be easy to think many other use cases and I am sure that augmented reality and data glasses will be used in industry. Also the ethical questions will be much easier than in consumer use cases.

Google glasses are well known globally but there are a lot of other companies and projects working with data glasses and augmented reality.  Augumenta  is start-up company developing a clever idea to control wearables with gestures. Their solution can also be used to increase privacy: you can key in the pin code of you phone so that only you see the touchscreen keys you are touching. In Marin2 project Technology Research Center in University of Turku and industry partners will be developing augmented reality solutions for wider industry use after completing Marin project than concentrated in marine industry. VTT started a project about augmented assembly already in 2006.

Low cost virtual reality glasses available for everyone and with high quality cameras and computer will certainly cause some ethical discussion. Will it be acceptable to use the glasses in public places and be able to take pictures or record video all the time? What if someone uses face-recognition and search engine while walking in the streets and will be able to know the names and ages of the people he will see in the street? Connected data glasses with good camera will enable new applications that are not possible with cameras that only record video. It remains to be seen what will be accepted in public places. Certainly it will take time before people will realize what will be possible and it will be even more time to agree related legislation and ethics. I remember from school that in the very early days of railroad business some people in England where thinking that it has to be unhealthy for cows to look a train passing by with high speed (30km/h). Nowadays people concerned about well-being of animals often prefer travelling by trains.

History is one of the most interesting fields when developing consumer applications using augmented reality like demonstrated here.

Buying clothes form online shops with 3D selfie?

I predict that on-line shopping will be getting very interesting starting 2015.

Just before CES2015 Fuel3D launches a device that helps you to take 3D selfie. A couple of next steps in selfie scanner development and it could be possible to take 3D selfie of you with exact measures of your body and upload the file to an online shop application. The application could then tell to you that what is the size that fits you best and generate a 3D image showing you using the pieces of clothes you are planning to buy. Interesting and easier than to queue up a clothing store fitting booth.

More digital shopping in supermarkets

Local supermarket has shopping carts that can hold a shopping list written in a piece of paper so that it is easy to read.The paper in the picture is empty because I don’t use shopping lists made on paper nowadays. I took the picture with my smartphone where I had the shopping list in OneNote. A cloud based list is better because then I will not forget my shopping list as long as I remember to take my smartphone with me. I can share the list so that everyone my family can edit it at home, at work, wherever. I would like to see that shopping list in the shopping cart and in electrical format of course.

Would it be possible?

Technologically it would be doable. Just put a touchscreen on the handle of the cart and NFC or some IoT solution to transfer the list from my phone on cloud to the screen. Touchscreen will be needed to easily tick out the items I have already picked. More advanced model could help me to find the shelf where the items I wan’t to have are located and even optimize the route to find all the wanted items. There is small challenge how to get electricity for the screen. It would be easy to put a battery but more challenging to find a cost efficient way to get it loaded or replaced. Maybe a small dynamo connected to the wheels of the cart would solve the challenge.

How about economically? For sure the carts with digital shopping list will be more expensive and most people don’t want to pay extra about this kind of fancy shopping list. But maybe the supermarket with these kind of advanced carts will be more attractive for some of the people. It would be easy to run some clever ads in the screen and try to get the customer to buy something more. Or even launch some nice mobile phone application to help you make the shopping list, proposing some nice recipes, and something else and finally helping you to easily find the goods from the shop.

Getting interested about IoT and digital media

It is time to learn something new. I decided to learn something about digital media, Internet of whatever and marketing/sales.

I found that I am not fully up to date about digital media and there is lot of interesting things to learn. For example a couple of experts from Super Analytics were giving very interesting presentation in a startup lecture organized by Boost Turku. I decided to get hands on experience about Twitter, blogs, Google Analytics and something more. I already had something going on in Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. So here I am writing my first post to this blog.

Internet of Things seems to be very hot topic at the moment. I would say that there is hype going on around it. Hype or not I got interested about what possibilities different connected devices could offer and found out that a company called Haltian had launched Thingsee One project in Kickstarter. They were collecting funding to develop a device with modem and sensors and a development kit allowing everyone to develop own IoT solution. The project got funded and I got very interesting challenge to learn how to make some useful application with Thingsee. Maybe I will attach Thingsee to by road bike and find out how to use the data it can collect.

In November 2014, I started in Expert on Doing Business in the Baltic Sea Region Training Programme at Turku University of Applied Sciences.