Folks, it is the Pokemon Go season 🙂 are you excited?
Perhaps not?! Ok, tell me one thing honestly. Do you get strange looks from your millennial friends when they find out you haven’t played Pokemon Go or that you don’t know how to use Snapchat?
Don’t play Pokemon Go? good news, you are not alone.
I will give you in on one more secret. I have never watched the “Game of Thrones”. For whatever its worth, I don’t feel like watching it either.
In the hyperconnected ADHD world, virulence is an everyday thing. New fads catch the masses and they spread like wildfire. Profound technology waves however, rarely do so. They start relatively unannounced. Grow like strong forces of nature, and are very hard to stop. The growth is rarely abrupt. Think – iPhone, social, e-commerce etc. the tweet below is a nice reminder.
Getting to 1 billion cumulative:
– iPhone 9.1 yrs.
– IBM PC 20.8 years.
– Android ~4.5 yrs.– McDonald’s 23 yrs served.
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) July 28, 2016
– Facebook 8.7yrs users
Artificial intelligence, I believe is one such profound technology wave.
It is growing like a strong force of nature devouring information, getting smarter and better everyday. We are still in its early days but are beginning to see some really really cool applications.
A London based company, and fully owned by Google is called DeepMind. We recently learnt that it improved the power usage efficiency / PUE of Google’s data centres by 15%. Can you imagine how much money that saves for the company that runs one of the largest data centre ops on the planet? Not too long ago, DeepMind AI became the first to beat a world champion at the infamously difficult game Alpha Go. These are not small developments. On a much larger scale they signify a tectonic shift in the maturity of machine learning. DeepMind algorithms use convoluted learning, more specifically reinforcement learning. In simple words, they learn without specific programming given a goal, they “try to figure the best way” to solve a problem.
These relatively specific developments when multiplied by the opportunity scale promises nothing short of a revolution.
Abhi Shah
This one I believe is going to be an “Inside-out” one.
Take an industry e.g. aircraft manufacturing, apply deep learning and you have a 15% or even better efficiency in outcomes of a process for instance predictability in ordering of wing parts. Algorithms will let us learn causality like never before by letting these neural networks figure out hidden patterns. There is a good blog post by Google about machine vision visualisation; click the link in the caption below.
How a machine sees a painting (credit Google Research)
We are not too far away from an applications of computer vision that once seemed far fetched, for instance looking at your CCTV, your computer might tell you who is on the door before you find out! (Edit: Already solved). Ultimately more exciting and probably scary applications will come too. I believe that will take some time, and to my earlier point, highly potent AI has just made an unassuming entrance, now just wait and watch as it turns into an unstoppable force. I will leave you with an image created by convolutional neural networks – this sort of gives us a flavour of how computers “see” or some would say “dream” things. Credit Google Research.
Only if Google’s AI could teach me how to use Pokemon Go or Snapchat. Nope, I like being stubborn, I don’t think so.
Abhi Shah
So the difference between Pokemon Go and Google’s inception-ism is that one seems like a fad, and the other seems like a unstoppable tech wave, let’s see where they both lead us.
Abhinandanshah.com 