Year Million is a science fiction mini-series premiered in National Geographic Channel. The show explores a variety of world-changing innovations; imagining a distant future while also showing the state of these technologies in the present day. Later episodes consider the prospect of immortality, uploading the mind to a virtual cloud, and exploring different universes, but the premiere focuses on artificial intelligence and explains the possibilities of achieving that.
As Charles Soule, the Marvel comic book writer says Year Million is not the millionth year. It is a concept that talks about how the world will be after a dramatic change with the influence of science and technology. One of the main inventions that will shape the future is the creation and rise of Artificial Intelligence. What defines being an human being is the mind or the consciousness. If we can create this most powerful mind, it will be the breakthrough to the Year Million. Artificial Intelligence while being amazing can be threatening as well. I wish to share the concepts of Artificial Intelligence that are discussed in this mini-series in simple words as I understood.
Evolution of AI
Is it possible to store the details of a brain when the person dies and then upload these details to a robot and bring back the dead person? Will this only happen in science fiction movies? When Wright Brothers made their first airplane, the plane rarely lifted few feet from the ground. Just fifty years after that the Boeing 707 started flying. In the last half century we have imagined and created AI that can interact with us and even beat us at our own games. Therefore it may be possible.
The first AI programmes were created in early 1950’s. The first famous AI programme and public demonstration was “Deep Blue” computer beating a chess grand master. In 2011 IBM’ Watson won a million dollars on Jeopardy, a game in an American TV channel. In 2016 AlphaGo defeated one of the world’s best players of Go ( Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent). Further, even our mobile phones are pocket sized AI. These give us a glimpse of what an Year Million AI will look like. Our personal computers never learn anything new. But the new AI machines can learn on its own. Erica, the Android is one of the most sophisticated humanoid robots ever designed. Erica run on Neural Networks that re wires themselves after learning something new. Erica uses sensors that are placed around the room to see the environment, remembers the persons and things that move around and recognizes when they come the next time. This can be thrilling and also terrifying.
Automation
Already automation has taken many jobs away from the human. Let’s take crops that are larger than 5000 acres. Automation can make the processes a lot more easier. Computers can be used to plan and observe the planting, harvesting and other operations. These operations can be recorded. When there is an issue, it can be identified and in the next year the issue can be avoided. This allows efficiency and time management. The tractors can be auto guided and harvest even without the driver. Futurists think that AI can take even the more complex jobs that requires experts like medicine, engineering, architecture, law and other. A computer that operates as a personal assistant in Microsoft, has 15 years of stored in it and never misses anything.
Artificial Consciousness
Hod Lipson, Robotics Engineer in University of Columbia has built a robot that learns equivalent to a new born baby. It not only senses the world, also it senses itself. It can imagine how itself looks like. Qualia is a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. It is a term used to describe what we feel, something like the taste of a chocolate or the smell of the ocean. It is very difficult to describe these or program these feelings into a computer. Hod Lipson says computers can go beyond human beings and that is possible. Another important unique quality that humans have is the creativity. Can machines start painting, composing music or writing a novel? Robots in University of Columbia browse through the Internet and learn the images of mountains, oceans and etc. Then the robot starts painting, it paints something new using its own imagination. Therefore what Hod Lipson says is that there is nothing that makes human beings unique.
The Singularity
The singularity is the point where a conscious artificial intelligence machine is created and is smarter than human. Every feature of human is created with the combination of physics, biology and chemistry and these features can be recreated. Every new generation learns everything that all the generations before had learn’t. Therefore the growth of knowledge and wisdom is exponential. When all these knowledge is fed into an AI machine, it can outsmart human. Experts say that Artificial Intelligence is the last invention we have to make and from there AI will start making its own.
Man vs AI
AI can give us enormous power in fulfilling our needs and creating things. At the same time AI can become a dominant power than us. What will happen if the machines start thinking that they are better without us? When they are self aware they can become independent of our wishes. Another question is when machines have self consciousness and thinking power do they have to be given some rights like human rights? That may happen.
Man Embraces AI
We struggle so hard to solve complex problems regarding the earth and the universe. What if we can transfer those algorithms to the more powerful thinking machines to be solved? We can remove the consciousness that may go negative and harness the processing power of the machines. What we have to make sure is that we program our AI carefully. AI technology is not always a threat. It can be used in unpredictably beautiful ways. The world in future is going to see humans co-existing with machines.
Next : Year Million – The Immortality
