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Category: Hardware

Hardware relates to the limitations and advances or the physical machines that enable AI. This topic includes things like murphy’s law, AI chips, and the emergence of quantum computing. By looking at the physical nature of these machines, I seek to both demystify and inform the often misleading claims about AI.

Warfare AI in Ukraine: How Algorithms are Changing Combat

There is a war in Europe, again. Two weeks in and the world is watching in disbelief as Russian forces invade Ukraine. While the conflict is still confined to the two nations, the proximity to NATO nations and the unpredictability of the Russian autocrat has caused the world to get the jitters. It is too soon to speak of WWIII but the prospect is now closer than it has ever been.

No doubt this is the biggest story of the moment with implications that span multiple levels. In this piece, I want to focus on how it is impacting the conversation on AI ethics. This encompasses not only the potential for AI weapons but also the involvement of algorithms in cyber warfare and in addressing the refugee crisis that result from it. In a previous blog, I outlined the first documented uses of AI in an armed conflict. This instance requires a more extensive treatment.

Andrew Ng Rethinks AI warfare

In the AI field, few command as much respect as Andrew Ng. Former Chief Scientist of Baidu and co-founder of Google Brain, he has recently shifted his focus to education and helping startups lead innovation in AI. He prefaces his most recent newsletter this way:

I’ve often thought about the role of AI in military applications, but I haven’t spoken much about it because I don’t want to contribute to the proliferation of AI arms. Many people in AI believe that we shouldn’t have anything to do with military use cases, and I sympathize with that idea. War is horrific, and perhaps the AI community should just avoid it. Nonetheless, I believe it’s time to wrestle with hard, ugly questions about the role of AI in warfare, recognizing that sometimes there are no good options.

Andrew Ng

He goes on to explain how in a globally connected world where a lot of code is open-source, there is no way to ensure these technologies will not fall in the wrong hands. Andrew Ng still defends recent UN guidance that affirms that a human decision-maker should be involved in any warfare system. The thought leader likens it to the treatment of atomic weapons where a global body audits and verifies national commitments. In doing so, he opens the door for the legitimate development of such weapons as long as there are appropriate controls.

Photo by Katie Godowski from Pexels

Andrew’s most salient point is that this is no longer a conversation we can avoid. It needs to happen now. It needs to include military experts, political leaders, and scientists. Moreover, it should include a diverse group of members from civil society as civilians are still the ones who suffer the most in these armed conflicts.

Are we ready to open this pandora’s box? This war may prove that it has already been open.

AI Uses in the Ukraine’s war

While much is still unclear, reports are starting to surface on some AI uses on both sides of the conflict. Ukraine is using semi-autonomous Turkish-made drones that can drop laser-guided bombs. A human operator is still required to pull the triggers but the drone can take off, fly and land on its own. Russia is opting for kamikazi drones that will literally crash into its targets after finding and circling them for a bit. This is certainly a terrifying sight, straight out of Sci-fi movies – a predator machine that will hunt down and strike its enemies with cold precision.

Yet, AI uses are not limited to the battlefield. 21st-century wars are no longer fought with guns and ammunition only but now extend to bits and bytes. Russian troll farms are creating fake faces for propagandist profiles. They understand that any military conflict in our age is followed by an information war to control the narrative. Hence the use of bots or another automated posting mechanism will come in handy in a situation like this.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Furthermore, there is a parallel and very destructive cyber war happening alongside the war in the streets. From the very beginning of the invasion, reports surfaced of Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. There are also multi-national cyber defense teams formed to counteract and stop such attempts. While cyber-attacks do not always entail AI techniques, the pursuit to stop them or scale them most often does. This, therefore, ensures AI will be a vital part of the current conflict

Conclusion

While I would hope we could guarantee a war-free world for my children, this is not a reality. The prospect of war will continue and therefore it must be part of our discussions on AI and ethics. This becomes even more relevant as contemporary wars are extending into the digital sphere in unprecedented ways. This is uncharted territory in some ways. In others, it is not, as technology has always been at the center of armed conflict.

As I write this, I pray and hope for a swift resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. Standing with the Ukrainian people and against unilateral aggression, I hope that a mobilized global community will be enough to stop a dictator. I suspect it will not. In the words of the wise prophet Sting, we all hope the Russians love their children too.

How Will AI Accelerate Cyborgization?

In a previous blog, I described how current technology adoption is transforming us into cyborgs. In this blog, I want to show how AI will accelerate and reinforce cyborgization and why this matters. Much has been said about the emergence of AI as the fearsome “other” that is coming to challenge humanity. A much more pressing conversation is how AI will redefine humanity. It is not the robot against us but the robot in us that we need to think about. That is why it is important to understand how AI will accelerate the march toward cyborgization.

Enabling Better Interfaces

AI technologies will speed up the march towards cyborgization by enabling more human-friendly interfaces. This is difficult to imagine now when our users experience is tied to a “QWERTY” keyboard. Also, voice recognition is still at its beginning stages (hence, why I keep on having arguments with Siri because she does not understand what I am saying). Yet, it is not a leap to imagine a world in which we do not type but speak to devices. This is only possible if these machines can hear and understand us. It is only safe if they can recognize who we are either by voice of vision. Last week, Apple launched Iphone X with a visual recognition feature that allows you to unlock the phone by simply looking at the screen. This is a breakthrough step in face recognition. Also, as Amazon, Google and Apple race to develop the leading voice-assistant, speaking to our devices will become more common. As AI improves so will our ability to interact with machines in more human-like manners. This will transform how we use these devices allowing them to play a larger role in our daily lives.

Bringing Order to Digital Chaos

Interfaces are not the only areas enhanced by AI. Another notable area is AI’s ability to bring order to our current digital experience. To illustrate this concept, just think about what would be like to connect your brain directly to your Facebook or Twitter feed. It would result in a major headache driven a by a jumble of unrelated topics, pictures, comments, flashing through your mind. Needless to say that It would be disorienting. This is the state of social media delivery and why extended uses of it can be harmful to our mental health. Now imagine if our digital experience could be organized and filtered by an intelligent agent. Let say, there was an AI-enabled app that could automatically filter and organize what you see based on who you are, your mood and time of day. Wouldn’t that transform your digital experience?  This way, AI would not only allow easier interface with devices but also enhance the experience with these devices through learning about us as individuals. It is a daunting to imagine that devices could know our thoughts and feelings but this is no longer a far-fetched idea. We are surely giving away enough data about ourselves so they can do just that. As these devices “know” us better we will also be more willing to use, wear or embed them in our bodies.

Facilitating Life Extension

The third area in which AI will impact the march is life extension. This is possibly the most controversial and promising area that AI technologies can impact us. While on paternity leave in the last five weeks, I had the chance to observe our current healthcare system. I am grateful for the care we received through medical interventions and advice as we welcome our son to the world. Yet, it was also clear how rudimentary our health care is. We currently rely on painfully invasive tests, disconnected systems, fragmented knowledge and healthcare worker memories for our medical data. No wonder we are running into so many problems in this area. If we could just improve how we collect, store and analyze health data we could advance the quality of care significantly. To do that would require wearing or embedding sensors in our body for live monitoring and data collection. AI models could analyze the data coming from these sensors and translate them into individualized care plans. That is, medical care that is tailored to your bodies specific genetic and real-time conditions. Moreover, it allows for building predictive models to estimate lifespan. The hope is that those models would not only tell us how long we will live but also uncover ways we can prolong that lifespan.

How Will These Advances Move Us Toward Cyborgization?

If it becomes easier to communicate with devices, it is also easier to involve them in all aspects of our lives. The movie Her explores this trend by imagining a world where humans develop romantic relationships with their digital assistants. Here, I want to suggest it could also lead to making these devices indispensable to our bodies. In short, they would culminate into full-blown auxiliary brains. That is, currently from what we know, our brain has no “hard drive” that stores memories. The brain structure itself is the “memories”. However, if as interface advances from hearing our voice to actually to hearing our thoughts, then it could become an embedded hard drive. This hard drive then could store all the information coming from our senses. With the technology already being developed in intelligent agents, these auxiliary brains would not only store data but also organize, filter and prompt it based on what it learns from us. Moreover, it would benefit from body sensors and connection to advanced medical data to possibly extend our lifespans. Sci-fi literature already explores scenarios with these possibilities. For now, it suffice it to say that our mobile phones are the first generation of our auxiliary brains.

Are we ready to move into enhanced humanity? With the acceleration made possible by Artificial Intelligence, this reality may be here sooner than you think. It would be naive to simply embrace it uncritically or reject it outrightly. The main issue is not IF but HOW this will happen.

Are we willing to embrace the opportunity while also recognizing the dangers of an enhanced humanity?

Are we ready to become responsible cyborgs?

Confronting The March Towards Cyborgization

Science fiction cyborgs are scary. They make me wonder if we would ever co-exist with such beings in real life. Well, if you are looking for cyborgs you might as well start looking at the mirror. Our race to adopt the latest technologies is slowly but surely turning all of us into these fearsome creatures. Cyborgization is upon us whether we like it or not.

It this good, bad? Well, let me describe the trends and then we can discuss it. We’ll never wrestle with a reality that we do not name it first. As the adage goes: “the first step to healing is admitting we have a problem.”

Don’t believe me. Consider the following:

Last week Apple just announced that is making the iWatch less dependent on the iPhone. That means soon you’ll get most of the iPhone functionality in the iWatch. Elon Musk is talking about sending nano transmitters into our blood flow. In Wisconsin, a company is experimenting with just that, paying employees to implant chips in their hands. These are just a few examples of “body hacking”, where people are pushing further the envelope of fusing technology with our bodies. If technology conglomerates have their way, we are moving from buying devices we use to adding them to our bodies. The trend can be depicted as such:

desktop>>laptop>>tablet>>smart phone>>wearable device>>implant

Certainly, not everybody will sign up for implants. Yet, the fact that we now already have people willing to experiment with implants shows how far we have progressed in the spectrum above. Thirty years ago only a few of us owned desktop computers in our homes. Last year, the number of smart phones in the world surpassed 2 billion, just shy of 30% of the world population. The march towards cyborgization is in full-speed.

Cyborgs in Action: Sousveillance

So what would a world with cyborgs look like? What would we do with our extended bodies?

The events of Charlottesville this weekend reminded us of the evil undercurrents of racism that still purveys our culture.

[Here I must stop to make a few comments. Racism is goes against everything Christianity stands for. To say otherwise or to pretend there is equivalency on both sides betrays who we are. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. I also pray that we are able to come together to confront this evil in our midst.]

Curiously, the march and its aftermath also became a notable experiment in Sousveillance. Don’t know what that means, no worries. I just learned about it this week. Sousveillance is the fancy name for the growing phenomenon where people use their phones to record real-life events.

While this has been happening for a while, the novelty was the crowdsourced attempts to identify members of the march through social media. Basically, somebody recorded the faces of white supremacists marchers and posted their faces in twitter asking users to recognize and identify the individuals. As a result, one of the marchers lost his job after being outed in this social media driven act of sousveillance. Such development would not have been possible without the advent of devices that allow us to film and share images at ease.

This is an example of things to come. Ordinary individuals, leveraging their body extension tools to do things that were not possible otherwise. On the one hand this could lead to quicker apprehension of criminals in both identifying as well as providing physical evidence of their crimes. On the other hand this could quickly lead to an augmented version of mob mentality, where people are quickly branded guilty and made to pay for crimes they did not commit.While many are weary of government surveillance, citizen sousveillance can offer a welcome check. This is just one application of how cyborgization can change our world.

Framing the Conversation

So maybe becoming cyborgs is not such a bad thing. However, before dismissing or embracing this trend, it is important to ask a few questions. Here are some that come to mind.

Who is driving the march and who benefits most from it?

How does it help the most vulnerable?

How does it affect human relationships?

How do these devices enhance or diminish our humanity?

My biggest concern is not how fast these technological extensions are being adopted but how is it done. At this point, most of it is driven through marketing by large technology conglomerates telling us that we must adopt the latest gadget or else become irrelevant. The subtle message is not just that our current gadgets are outdated but that we ourselves are becoming useless.

Certainly marketing of artificial needs should not be the main driver for adopting these technologies. Instead, their adoption should undergo a deliberate process in which the questions listed above are at the forefront. Technology should never be an end to itself but a means to life enriching goals. We need to evolve from technology consumers to thoughtful agents that leverage technology for human flourishing.

At a personal level, a simple question would be: does this device improve my quality of life or not? If it does not, then it may be time to re-think its usage.