6. Smarter Future

A Smarter Future

It has been said that we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — a revolution that is completely different than the previous three. From steam and water power, electricity and assembly lines, and computerization to now challenging the ideas about what it means to be human.

According to Forbes, the Fourth Industrial Revolution “describes the exponential changes to the way we live, work and relate to one another due to the adoption of cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things and the Internet of Systems.”

Smarter technologies in our factories and workplaces and connected machines that will interact, visualize the entire production chain and make decisions autonomously is just a couple of the ways that the Industrial Revolution will cause advancements in business. One of the greatest promises that the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings is the potential to improve the quality of life for the world’s population and raise income levels. Our workplaces and organizations are becoming “smarter” and more efficient as machines, humans are starting to work together, and we use connected devices to enhance our supply chains and warehouses.

According to Gigabit Magazine, there are seven stages that will create a smarter world with AI:

1. Rule-Based Systems — domestic applications and RPA software that surrounds us everywhere, every day.

2. Context Awareness and Retention — algorithms that build up a body of information that is used and updated by machines. For example, chatbots and roboadvisors.

3. Domain Specific Expertise — machines that can develop expertise in a specific field that extends beyond the capability of humans because of all the informational access they can quickly get to, to reach a decision.

4. Reasoning Machines — these algorithms have a “theory of mind,” some ability to attribute mental states to themselves and others. They have a sense of beliefs, intentions, knowledge, and are aware of how their own logic works. Hence, they have the capacity to reason, negotiate, and interact with humans and other machines.

5. Self Aware Systems — the goal for those working in the AI field is to create and develop systems with human-like intelligence. There is no such evidence of that today but some say that there will be in as little as five years while others believe we may never achieve that level of intelligence.

6. Artificial Superintelligence — developing AI algorithms that are capable of outperforming the smartest of humans in every single domain.

7. Singularity and Transcendence — a development path enabled by ASI that could lead to a massive expansion of human capability, where one day we might be sufficiently augmented and enhanced such that humans could connect their brains to each other and to a future successor of the current internet.