(Editor’s note: This post on the future of AI is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and CEOs.)
If you get the feeling technology is changing the world faster than humans can adapt, you’re not alone. If you believe futurist and author Christian Kromme, artificial intelligence’s disruption of tech, business and ordinary life has just begun. And yes, Kromme says, everything is speeding up. Instead of transformative technology coming every 150 years, the timeline had already jumped to 10 years and now is five years, said the author of “Humanification: Go Digital, Stay Human.”
At High Tech Next on 20 November, he laid out in a fast-moving 45-minute presentation where humans have been and how that’s a roadmap to the future.
It’s a future of quickly evolving AI-enhanced technology designing, diagnosing, driving and nearly every other task humans do today.
Kromme used this analogy to explain the evolution of artificial intelligence:
Humans started as simple clusters of cells that evolved over a million years into complex systems, controlled by a brain – “basically the AI in the cloud of our body” – that takes in and processes information. A child starts learning to recognize colors, patterns and sounds until it grows into an autonomous adult.
“Well, AI is moving through the same stages but much, much, much faster. AI is running much faster and much better than your recognizing images or independent sense of information,” he said.
Seven waves
The futurist organizes the evolution of technology into seven waves, each wave a stepping stone to the next, putting in place the technologies for the next evolutionary period. Those epochs include the fourth wave of basic communications such as telegraphs and telephones. Then comes the fifth wave of television, radio and mass communications.
The Internet is the sixth wave.
“Now we move from our world that’s all about hardware, physical essence, expensive stuff, towards the world which is all about algorithms and software.”
Kromme predicts that two years from now, the Seventh Wave commences, “but we first have to understand the world. That’s basically what AI is doing: understand language, understand physics, to understand the environment, and we can do it. We can transform media, which is to the best screen in a smartphone, towards a layer on top of reality. That’s going to happen in a few years from now.”
He asserts that the evolutionary pattern we have seen in biology is repeating itself in tech. The Seventh Wave will have an even more profound impact on society, Kromme says. “Why? Because the interface of holographic technology will be so natural. That became a distinct reality and digitally, that will be so profound that everyone starts to embrace this technology.
“It’s about human needs and human behavior.”
Highlights
• AI supports increasingly complex organizations. Henry Ford had 4,000 people. AT&T had 40,000 people. IBM employed 500,000 using a smart organization technology. “And in the last wave profile, we saw more companies like Uber, for example, employing 3.8 million taxi drivers, not sitting somewhere in an office, but in our cars.”
• Kromme said Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts that in a few years, we will have a chip that has the same amount of information processing power as a human brain.
• Systems and robots will learn and will be able to do more and more of the tasks humans do now. “The big difference between this formation wave and previous formation waves is that (robots) can correct themselves. So, if something goes wrong, they can correct what they do and fix it,” Kromme said. Add to that a dialog interface so you can speak to robots and the interaction will be completely different because they’ll be able to understand complex language.
• AI algorithms already assist in tasks such as creating images from prompts. The next generation can create videos from text. That’s already changing marketing and advertising. Kromme showed the above commercial from Volvo that was created by one person in one day – a project that ordinarily take weeks and requires a complete team of creatives, camera people, animators and post-production people. “This is one person in one day. Normally this would cost, I think, five, 10 million to create a commercial like this. That’s how powerful these technologies are,” Kromme said.
• On the manufacturing side, Kromme predicts a new era of micro-factories with 3D printers and AI robots. On the engineering side, AI is learning to generate 3D CAD designs of physical products, understanding how the real world operates and product design functions.
We are moving from a world that asks how to a world that asks why, Kromme said. “You define the why, and the system starts to define the what and how.”
Insights
Kromme’s back story is that he started understanding the body as an evolving system after his daughter got a “very dark diagnosis.” Doctors told him to accept it: “There are no treatments, no medications available to save our daughter’s life.”
He needed to search for a solution. “And during that quest, I started to look differently towards the human body. I started to see the human body as a society of 50 trillion cells working together, a society of cells that already solves all problems. I saw all kinds of similarities between groups of people and groups of cells.”
His daughter is now 14 years old, “and she’s completely healthy, and Kromme gained profound insights. One of those insights is, if a skill can’t be digitized, it will increase in value. Soft human skills such as purpose and emotional range of creativity and curiosity and imagination will become more valuable.
Next-gen workplaces will require flexibility and fluidity, inspiration and learning, variable and diverse roles/tasks, but offer purpose and meaning.
“A lot of parents ask me, ‘How should I teach my kids to stay relevant? Should I teach them to become programmers?’ “ Probably not, Kromme said. There are AI applications that can write code for you.
So, this is where we are now. “Of course, we are at the beginning of our revolution, and you are at the beginning of this wave. So, imagine what this can be three, four or five years from now,” he said. “I think it will be mind boggling, what’s possible.”
While he sees creative destruction in our future. Jobs such as engineers will change or will disappear. Yet, Kromme has an optimistic vision of how AI can enable us to focus on soft skills and creativity, collaboration and innovation. “I don’t think that jobs will disappear. I think tasks will disappear, but jobs will evolve. And we have to re-skill people.”
The CEO of the future might not be a chief executive officer, but rather the chief asset officer looking at the ethical applications of how AI is affecting employees, supplier and customers: “I believe that the economy is more focused on social skills, which are, I think, harder to master than the tasks we do today.”
.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
