Essay

In our decision-making process, we seek external information to guide us. This includes the advice and opinions from people we know, people with expertise in the field or people we can trust.

To foster consciousness is vital if we are to maintain our mental independence in a digital world where fake information and malicious influencing are threatening the very foundation of our democratic society.

Augmenting humans by applying interactive Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can improve conscious experience as a means of making sound decisions against the destructive use of AI. Individuals who consistently make good decisions may not be the ones who are the smartest or the luckiest. They are the ones who thoroughly understand themselves.

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Neuromorphic systems offer two major promises: First, because they are pulse-driven, potentially asynchronous, and highly parallel, they could be a gateway to an entirely new way of computing at high performance and very low energy. Second, they could be the best vehicle to support unsupervised learning—a goal that may prove necessary for key applications such as autonomous vehicle navigation in unchartered areas or natural-language comprehension.

What neuromorphic chips can do is to provide self-learning without requiring large datasets as in convolutional artificial networks. The system learns similar to the way humans learn.

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In theory, a civilization might be less vulnerable to collapse if new technologies can mitigate against pressures such as climate change. Our technological capabilities may have the potential to delay collapse.

In the past, collapse was confined to regions – it was a temporary setback, and people often could return to agrarian lifestyles following the collapse. However, the world is now deeply interconnected and interdependent. Additionally, new instruments of violence, such as lethal autonomous weapons, will be available soon.

The most dangerous threat, however, comes from the exponentially rising complexity induced by AI in combination with the rise of inequality and oligarchy by tech-giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.

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Following an inquiry launched in 2017 as concern grew about the influence of false information and its ability to be spread unscrutinised on social media, a UK parliamentary committee has published its findings on February 18, 2019 after an 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news.

It could be vital that IEEE’s proposed standard ‘P7008 for Ethically Driven Nudging by Robotic, Intelligent and Autonomous Systems’ in combination with strong government supported regulations against misuse can restore trust into internet applications and social media. Fighting this attempt, as perceived by the UK’s Parliamentary Committee when investigating Facebook, is likely to provoke the ‘Digital Gangster’ image.

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Back in 2017 Denis Hassabis of Alphabet’s Deep Mind suggested intensifying the cooperation with Neuroscience to advance AI towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Now, two years later, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have made significant progress both in respect to diversity as well as quality.

Humans have a powerful “physical intelligence” to infer physical properties of objects and predict future states in complex, dynamic scenes. This “abstract system of knowledge” is based on physics (for example forces or masses) and psychology (for example desires or beliefs).

As new computational methods continue to be provided by research, intelligent machines are likely to match humans in learning, possibly within the next ten years.

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To advance AI and Deep-learning further, three issues need to be addressed:
Time:  It can take weeks to train deep-learning networks, engaging high-salaried individuals.
Cost:  Computer time on hundreds of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) for weeks is expensive.
Data:  In many cases the lack of enough labelled data simply makes it impossible to carry out the project.

To handle the raising complexity to solve these problems requires increased hardware performance.
A three-way race for future AI-applications is on the way, employing the following hardware technologies:

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)
• Neuromorphic Computing (NC)
• Quantum Computing (QC)

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Philosophy can help to provide purpose and guidance by tackling fundamental questions about the meaning of life. Artificial intelligence has close connections with philosophy because both share several concepts such as intelligence, consciousness, epistemology, and even free will.

The idea behind having a CPO is that the position could be helpful in a business environment that is accelerating at an unprecedented speed.

The main-responsibility of a CPO is to provide support for interfacing human values and skills with intelligent machines in order to optimize the potential of man-machine augmentation. To reach this goal he must motivate the team-members to ask questions that are outside of the ‘corporate box’.

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The raising complexity of deep-learning algorithms and networks is beginning to backfire as a lack of transparency generates distrust and concern regarding the ethical implications of possible errors in the results computed.

Next to the regulatory and ethical issues which will continue to be discussed well into 2019 and beyond, we are likely to witness two efforts to restore trust:

Provide secure communication based on quantum-internet to protect private and corporate data with secure access for anyone across the entire globe and to move from a technology-driven AI to a human centric AI, where AI augments humans to reap the potential benefits of AI while adhering to ethical standards as part of the application.

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Progress in language translation provokes the question if it still makes sense to learn a foreign language. Taking this thought a step further, we must raise the question, if our educational institutions are ready of adjusting their learning concepts.

Personalized learning provides the freedom to learn in one’s own time and learning at one’s own pace. Humanity has the unique chance to replace the inefficiency of hierarchical class-room learning with individualized concepts employing AI technology.

Adolescence is the time to foster human values. By combining science and humanities as part of a new educational concept we set the stage to unlock the potential benefits of future AI-applications driven by the three C’s: Curiosity, Consciousness and Creativity.

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Homo sapiens first appeared some 100’000 years ago in Southern Africa. There is evidence that this species was of basically modern intelligence. However, Homo sapiens at that time was crucially lacking in creative imagination.

About 40’000 years ago Creativity ‘burst’ onto the planet as can be observed from remarkable cave paintings or the invention of new stone-tools. There is no consensus among the research community why this happened so suddenly and much remains a mystery.

Following the path of evolution, one can consider AI as a tool invented by humans, which can augment our lives both emotionally as well as logically. However, AI-machines have no intrinsic capability to sustain Creativity without incorporating human values and adherence to the laws of natural sciences.

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