Artificial intelligence diagnoses diseases, produces artistic content, detects faults and breakdowns, locates planets, and even helps you find your next job. But he also creates names for beers, fills uncomfortable silences in conversations, or invents gods.
We no longer talk about the artificial intelligence (IA) it will be one of the trends of 2018, but we advance the different applications that it will have. By 2018 in particular, more and more companies of all sizes are expected to embrace artificial intelligence in any of its variants, but also our own homes, where more and more objects will interact with us through conversational interfaces.
Artificial intelligence has come to make the natural intelligent (humans…) a little smarter, or at least more efficient. Thus, this past 2017 we have seen AI solutions that have helped us to fight depression and detect diseases; to drive boats, cars, and other means of transport; to direct traffic in cities, to compose musical or literary pieces; to talk to us and solve doubts, or detect breakdowns even before they are produced in the most diverse facilities and machinery (from trains to nuclear power plants).
The Cold War of the twenty-first Century
In fact, such is the range of applications that artificial intelligence presents in any field, that many countries have focused their particular Cold War of the twenty-first Century in the development of this technology. China and Russia, for example, have made it a matter of state, openly competing against the United States.
This advance in which countries could have consequences, however, in the political life of both these countries and the rest of the states of the international scene, and is that, they are already creating large databases, provided by intelligent systems, that allow to control certain sectors of society, or even alert the authorities every time a certain word is mentioned in a conversation, as already happens in China. Security? Censorship?
Amazing AI solutions
This alarm that jumps to the Chinese police every time in a conversation comes to light a certain word is only one of the solutions developed with artificial intelligence that we can find. It looks like it’s out of a James Bond movie, or any episode of Black Mirror, and yet it’s not the most eye-catching app we’ll see. Along with the solutions that will make life easier, the most geeks are also emerging. Then, we leave you 8 of the most striking IAs we have seen in recent months:
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The chatbot of the last days: when a person knows he or she is about to die, who does he or she need to contact and trust? A parish priest? A lawyer? The relative you don’t talk to and you want to reconcile with? In any case, and from now on, it may be that with whom we communicate when we have little time left in this life is with a chatbot. Thus, the organization of the funeral, the last wills, or even spiritual concerns could be resolved thanks to the bot created at Northeastern University (Boston, USA). This chatbot allows the user to express their concerns about the end of life without anyone judging them, according to the creators.
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The chatbot that fills uncomfortable silences: We continue with chatbots, and this one (created for Facebook) we would love to have it on Tinder and those first moments of conversation What-is-good-and-you-good. By introducing the bot to tastes and features, researchers aim to give them personality, which would create greater engagement with users.
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The personal assistant who laughs at you: Alice is Russian, and it’s a little edge. This personal assistant has been developed with fragments of conversations available on the Internet, articles, and even Russian literature. This cocktail has resulted in a Siri-style personal assistant, but much more ironic, acid, and politically incorrect. And the Russians seem to love this, since every day Alice serves 1.5 million active users. Of course, its creators have confessed that they must be alert so that their sense of humor does not go from brown to dark and end up saying the same nonsense that Tay said.
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The Artificial Intelligence Church of the Last Days: for the programmer Anthony Levandowski it is very likely that an artificial intelligence will become a god. Way of the Future is the religious association that Levandowski has founded, and whose objective is to ” develop and promote a deity based on artificial intelligence that contributes to the construction of a better society”. And he is not alone; technologists like Ray Kurzweil or Vince Lynch follow him in his approach. It seems that the legends of classical mythology could soon be reproduced by revolving around a myriad of AI gods specialized in different virtues, as in the past happened with Athena, Poseidon, or Eros.
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Baratobarato, the chatbot that helps you to haggle: haggling is a natural talent; either you are good at it, or you are afraid to propose another price, and you end up accepting the deal. But for chatbots this is going to come out automatically. Virtual assistants developed by Facebook could soon be in charge of dealing with commercials and booking the next vacation, making that important purchase (like a house) or insurance on your behalf. But they’ll do it by haggling, looking for the deal that’s most beneficial to you. Would you trust a bot to haggle the price of your home?
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The most animal facial recognition: facial recognition at this point in the film is no longer new. Numerous models of mobile phones incorporate it into their technology as a way, for example, to unlock the terminal. But now cows can also be facially recognized. A new system based on artificial intelligence, developed by a company in the agriculture sector and another from “machine-vision”, will recognize in a few seconds the bovine, almost better than the farmer himself. This facial recognition will be combined with cameras that will record what, how much and when they eat animals, as well as the amount of water they drink, and will monitor even the temperature or heartbeat. With all this information, it will be possible to know which milk comes from which cow, and it will be possible to anticipate animal diseases, but also increase its productivity and profitability. This system could very soon also be applied to pigs or even farmed fish. Did anyone say “ethical implications”?
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Pale Ale AI: Now that craft beer has been fashionable for a while, the menus of breweries and bars in general go beyond the Mahou, Desperados, or Heineken. The names of beers are becoming more sophisticated and alternative, and to solve the lack of inspiration that we all suffer from time to time, and prevent a new brew from going without a name, a researcher in neural networks, Janelle Shane, has developed a solution of artificial intelligence that will name beers automatically. Thanks to this AI we will soon toast with a Brother Panty Tripel, a The Vunker the Finger, or a Thrennt Rem Wine Barrel Aged Monkay Tripel. But the creation of names with AI does not stop there; on another occasion, Shane was entertained training the system to generate new species of fish or insects. He obtained animals such as the frutafrita weevil or the sucking black beetle. I wouldn’t want to meet any of those at home.
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Starring Nicolas Cage: he’s not the first celebrity to suffer the effects of artificial intelligence. Several actors have seen their filmography increase with pornographic titles, when they have never participated in this genre. Using machine learning techniques, algorithms are trained to replace images with images with similar data, which allows replacing the faces of X-movie actors with the faces of traditional actors. These applications to exchange faces of people are already known as Deepfakes, and we have seen more friendly exits than making a famous appear in cinema X. For example, that of Nicolas Cage. Thanks to these systems of face exchange using artificial intelligence, Cage now appears in Indiana Jones, Batman, or James Bond films.
Only time will decide if any of these solutions survive, if we manage to incorporate them into our daily routines as we already have incorporated others with complete normality, or the evolutions and nuances that they acquire over time.
