Human bot or Intelligent human, choice is yours!
Humans don’t have to think, perhaps only when to make the machines more smarter, otherwise going to be like a dumb terminal connected to mainframe! Is this analogy unsettling? Look around us. IoT, ML, AI, DL, NN, BC (there is a technology for every combination of alphabets.. not to mention Alphabet itself is googling to create more of these!), are all ganged up together, vying for supremacy over human.
A day in a life of a human - there is a wearable tracking your sleep, another "thing" wakes you up and greets you with good morning, reminds you of all the appointments, forces you to make breakfast, guiding (instructing) along the way, and the intelligent “thing” in the bathroom reads you all the things happened in the world while you were sleeping!
Now it is time to office… now all the sensors in your dwelling wakes up and pushes you out of the door to a connected car, and the human sits disconnected from the fellow beings. The connected road ensures that you get the celebrity treatment, and you reached office. Of course the door opens to you on your sight, the elevator takes you to the intended floor without uttering a word. Now you are in the office and machines continue to talk - we have taken care everything for you, no access cards, bio-metrics, but we know your profile. Lights will be "on" for you, and seats will be adjusted and you will have the perfect working (?!) environment for you. Now we expect you to solve problems!
Is this sound futuristic? From my perspective, it is not. Almost all of these, and many other interactions not mentioned here are happening already and multiple business cases and models exists in respective industries. Also the respective enabling technologies are maturing fast, and it is just a matter of time, cross industry integration happens, and you will become a human robot managed and operated by a system of robots!
Internet of Things (IoT) played (and will continue to play) a major role in this transformation. It helped collect data, and see and explore things that were not seen in the past. It made sense of other technologies and drive value. Armed with data and patterns, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolved from laboratory settings to mainstream. Deep Learning (DL) and Neural Networks (NN) taking this to next level to make the “things” think and Block Chain (BC) trying to keep all the transactions secure and enable machine to transact themselves, and freeing up human brain in the process.
Humans worked on “digital twins” of the machines to understand it better, soon machines will be working on our digital twins to understand us better!
OK, what is the human being going to do then? Of course, make machines (things) even smarter (of course aided by machines) is one of the responsibilities! (So that machines can refer us as intelligent “humans” in their world!)
Now with all the day-to-day mundane things that we crib about being taken care of by the intelligent “things”, we are expected solve much bigger problems. One of them is the "digital divide" this is going to create. The digitization is universal, but is not inclusive yet.
We should be overworking to spread the digitization, that will bring much needed transparency, awareness to the underprivileged, and enabling them to participate in the digital economy and thereby creating more jobs and good living conditions for all.
There are other critical problems humans will continue to tackle and gain upper hand – cancer free society, increasing life expectancy, predictions on potential disease outbreak etc. will have our focus, but outcomes will be faster with all the intelligent machines helping us out there.
So the choice is ours - we can be indifferent to the things happening around us, and become machines (machines can be replaced easily!), or be open to challenges, master new skills, and be a master to the machines (things)!
This post first appeared in LinkedIn.
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