We may become much smarter in a post-Covid-19 world

Global pandemics will only push the world into creating systems where the human being can be replaced in emergencies and the number of tasks that can be done artificially will only increase exponentially. Humanity’s march towards AI may only become faster.

Governments and organizations all over the world are already collating a huge amount of data relate to the Covid-19 disease, it’s spread and mapping of victims and using AI tools to see how best to mitigate the problems and use predictive analysis in a bid to halt its growth. Chatbots were trained with the details of the disease to answer the basic questions of the troubled populace. This is already being called a Black Swan event which may be crucial in understanding a global pandemic and its learnings may be applied to other areas. This is a dynamic model being dealt with in real-time. Facial recognition is already widespread and in future everyone may start using tools to screen air passengers and citizens in public who show signs of fever and other characteristics that suggest that they are sick. Drones could also be used for video surveillance. The list is endless.

But if all goes well, then we will fully recover from the Coronavirus Covid-19 global epidemic, with minimum casualties. In the short run we will enter an economic recession. However in the long run, you can be sure that a lot of innovation will come out of the crisis and the world may totally change and take a tech trajectory for the better. Work From Home has been supersized in 2020. We will find that many jobs could have been WFHed in the first place and there will be a certain amount of optimization in the way it’s all done. Collaboration tools will proliferate and prosper. People are indeed using them to the max, with Zoom being one of them.

Contactless operations are the in thing now and hence governments may finally give the green signal for drone deliveries and driverless cars on a nationwide scale. Both robots and Robotic Process Automation will get a boost, as industries will want to replace many human tasks to cope with future pandemic scares. The medical industry will see a tech upgrade. 3D printing could play a big role in that. Tech valleys may mushroom all over the globe as countries will want to have a much less dependence on China. However if there’s one ring to rule them all, one technology to power them all, then it has to be Artificial Intelligence.

What is AI? This is at the root of the debate and there is very little consensus as to what is AI in the first place. While the Turing Test talked of a computer’s ability to fool a human into thinking it was another human, there have been modest gains with things like chatbots beating other men into proving that they would be better boyfriends, in short limited tests that women participated in.

To bypass this problem, sometimes AI faces further sub-divisions. There’s weak AI or narrow AI which includes things like Siri. There’s strong AI or full AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which we are trying to master and implement fully. Finally there’s Superintelligence and maybe that’s the only thing that Hollywood is fixated upon. Huge amounts of data (Big Data) and a huge computing power (with Hyperscale making huge strides) makes one think that the era of AI is finally upon us and the applications of AI will probably now increase exponentially.

The 2010s saw great progress. The computer won at popular American games like Jeopardy! and the ultra-complex Go. We also got Alexa and Siri and made strides in Natural Language Processing. Google Duplex plans to take that even further. Microsoft’s Kinect was a breakthrough in tracking body movement. Actual robots can now self-learn, navigate hazardous tracks and play games just like humans. The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) made great strides in image recognition.

These are all individual components and the idea is to ultimately have a single AI system that may be able to run across the entire global network. In one of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke’s books, an AI system becomes a virtual President of the world and takes all the decisions. If you are a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fan, then you know Ultron is a malevolent form of that. Another idea that has caught on in Silicon Valley is the singularity, where we will all merge with the machine and there will be one combined organism that will encompass both humanity and a Superintelligent AI.

Of course we are a long away from that, or are we?