Something fascinating to me about the world is how so many billions of people can act for their own self interests, and yet we’re all able to eat. Fewer and fewer of us are dying from preventable illnesses and medical technology has evolved to a point where we’re thinking about extending and enhancing human life past a century.
Collective intelligence describes the apparatus by which groups of individuals act collectively in ways that seem intelligent. For centuries, at least around 8000 years, humanity has demonstrated some form of collective intelligence. We’ve formed civilizations, shaped the landscape around us, and even touched the surface of the moon. However, recently, the definition of collective intelligence is expanding to include non-human machines. The whole is
Many people, including very smart people like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking, are afraid of the impending artificial intelligence revolution. They’re scared that once the proverbial chicken has hatched, and we create an AI that can act on its own, we may already be too late to stop it. There’s a great article that a friend shared with me about how a simple handwriting robot could cause the death of all life on earth and eventually the entire observable universe, check it out here. So, there’s no shortage of doom and gloom abound about artificial intelligence and why it’s going to pee in our cheerios and make us all subservient to its whims #hailSkynet. Luckily, not everyone is so negative about the prospects for AI. In fact, there’s one way that even if the experts are right, and we can’t beat a true AGI (artificial general intelligence), we may be able to become one ourselves.
The MIT Center for Collective intelligence is an organization devoted to exploring how people and computers can be connected so that – collectively – they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before.
That’s the answer! If we are afraid that AI is going to destroy us, we have to merge with it before it can. The good news is that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Humans + Computers >> Computers alone.
Leaving the negativity behind, many experts are demonstrating that Artificial Intelligence will help improve millions of lives. It will create meaningful work for people and let us focus on what we’re great at instead of what we must do to survive. Companies in industries ranging from Finance to Transportation, to Medicine, are using AI to make life better for their customers, and for their employees. Let’s hope that this trend continues.
I’ll be working on finding applications in my business for artificial intelligence, specifically one narrow piece of it, machine learning. I’m going to take you along with me as I dive into the conceptual and technical aspects of the technology. We’ll be learning together and exploring how existing AI can be used in business while beginning to understand how to create new AIs from the ground up. So far, I’ve learned to program with Python and I’ve even created software that uses convolutional neural networks able to identify images of certain animals (mainly dogs) and classify them into breeds with surprising accuracy. Soon I’ll be using these techniques to create financial modelling software to predict some market movement and make trades. If you are interested in joining me on this journey, sit back, grab a coffee, or a beer, and let’s get smarter together!