Are we lucky to live in such a diverse world full of new technologies and opportunities like skype, multi-touch tablets, mobile apps, 3D printers and drones? They all are around us already and are a part of our lives. Several functions are done today automatically without human interference like washing the dishes, cleaning or driving home without a driver. More will be done in future as the technology gets more and more innovative and unfortunately intrusive. We keep hearing new technologies like machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, Internet of things etc. We live in a digital world. Apparently, this is a smart world. Smart cities, smart healthcare, smart watch, smart TV, smart food, smart gym, smart learning and smart what not. It is almost like we are smarting under a smart overdose. In a make-believe world, we are being taken over by smart devices.
Good old-world charm of native intelligence anchored by native wisdom seems to have been hijacked by an artificial ecosystem. Is this good for the future of human race is debatable. Where do we begin? Since everything fulcrums around intelligence, why not begin at that?
Human intelligence is complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness that allows us to learn from concepts, understand, apply logic and reason, recognize patterns, comprehend ideas, plan, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate. How do we do this? With five basic senses like the sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Two more are the vestibular sense, which is our balance and movement sense and proprioception that tells our body our awareness. Together they help us understand and perceive the world around us. Many more, which we may have never thought of but only felt, actually make our human world smart. Of course, the central control system or the brain integrates them to function like a well-oiled machine.
AI recreates the human ecosystem albeit with everyday physical objects that bear functional similarities to human sensors. The idea is to connect all these devices which can communicate with each other and identify themselves with each other over the internet. Algorithms that can navigate through the maze of data from all these objects and create intelligent patterns that help take decisions would move us closer to creating our own clones besides improving the efficiency of work processes, which saves time and money. The maze of data is called brontobytes or 10 to the 27th power of bytes or simply big data. Is it then any surprise that all these devices connected to the internet will create our smart world that will change the way future societies work? Increasingly that our smart world becomes really smart, we need complex video streaming, a technology that supports a higher bandwidth spectrum like the 5G or the fifth-generation cellular network that is the next cog in the artificial ‘Jagannath Rath’
Will super intelligent AI exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and must we expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent? Instead, we need to seriously evaluate if AI might become a risk, like when it is programmed to do something devastating as with the autonomous weapons or when AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but ends up destructing for achieving its goal. Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute, said ‘Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before, as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial. Will all these technologies prove beneficial or prove the proverbial ‘millstone around one’s neck’, time alone will tell.
The first wave of digitisation that included computing, broadband and mobile telephony networks helped the traditional sectors of the economy to grow more rapidly. The alleviation of the resource constraint has led to increased demand for labour in service industries like financial services, education, health care, etc. It also had a positive effect in manufacturing. This has had an impact on the growth of household income, and the facilitation of social inclusion, access to information, government services, and entertainment content. The second wave led to the introduction of new services and applications such as Internet information searches, electronic commerce, distance education and a whole range of collaborative businesses that characterize the digital economy with companies like Uber, Airbnb, etc. This ‘innovation effect’ yielded enhanced demand for labour in certain occupations linked to the development of digital services. However, emergence of collaborative business models, saw the disappearance of repetitive low and middle‐skilled jobs resulting from task automation. The third wave of Smart world and IoT would certainly improve productivity across sectors. It could also improve the delivery of public services. There could be disruptive labour effects what with the industry transforming into a completely automated remote handled entity. Increasingly the low end jobs could dry up with required skill levels of available jobs going north compounded by the number of available jobs going south.
All this could be speculative, but the world is witness to and knows that a high level of technology and complexity, seldom adds to the number of jobs that employ the masses. In an age where digital technologies are used in pervasive ways whereby, they connect different entities, stakeholders, goals, processes and information resources, the human aspect becomes even more important in the context of ubiquitous optimization. The digitization of processes, deployments of digital solutions, strategic-cultural shifts, moving to a more customer-centric and integrated approach etc. all have a transformational impact and must be factored to get the human element on board. The government will be well served to remember a frequently cited 2013 Oxford University study that suggested almost 50 percent of jobs could be at risk of automation by 2033 and the new findings suggesting that workers in counties facing higher levels of automation risk, reported more frequent levels of physical and mental distress.
The Government while pursuing a digital push must lay stress on educating and bringing people around, for not doing so could easily stress the system beyond repair. We must remember that digitization is by no means dehumanization. On the contrary, without a strong involvement of both the government and the people, without taking the human element into account digital projects will fail.