Where Is Artificial Intelligence Leading The World? To The END?

Less than 100 years old Artificial intelligence (AI), born in the middle of 20^th century is ruling over the world. If you think it is not then I would say it is about to rule. It is also said that AI is 5000 years old but who cares. I will go with the younger one.

AI made its way all along from symbolic AI of good old fashioned artificial intelligence to future predicting models and expert systems. It is everywhere, in agriculture, in health, education, finance, media, music, marketing, HR, games, security, and over and beneath the tides of oceans and in the silent space and everywhere you can think of. All I am trying is just to say that AI is ubiquitous Period.

Researchers have made fascinating breakthroughs with breakneck speed but they are still striving to make milestones. AI is no more confined only to Hollywood, it is a reality now. The question is how
this reality would come to us? As a curse or as a blessing?

Max Hawkin, a software engineer, consciously submitted his will to his AI powered app. The app decides for him where to go, what to eat, who to meet, and even where to get which tattoo and the list continues.

"When the computer chose a location I would live there for roughly a month. Once there, the computer chose places to go, people to meet, and things to do within the selected city." Hawkin

Is this a way to escape from the panic of choosing one among many and making a decision or it is the beginning of AI realm?

Here is another story. 20 people die each day waiting for a transplant in US. Today over 100, 000 people need transplantation but only 54% of 95% adults who can donate organs are donating. You can see a big margin of waiting area in the chart given below. They need more donors to fill that waiting area. Someone thought why not to use technology?

Organ shortage chart-see full report here.

Are you familiar with bio printing? If not, it is a term used for creating real human organs using 3D printers that could be implanted in human, like in real living human. Isn’t it awesome? Of course it is. Computers can now create your body parts. It is time to get over the shortage of implantable organs and save lives like a super hero. They do not need donors (as much as they needed them before).

But what is the order side of the coin? Computers can now create real human organs which can be assembled to make a new real humanoid. What is the guarantee that super intelligent computers of the future won’t create its own army? An army with artificial intelligence. You might argue that AI cannot beat human intelligence because human mind is a much more complex structure than an electronic machine. This is correct for but keep reading. I am sure you will change your mind. I mark this point as extraction point. We will return to it.

Gorge Church, an American geneticist, molecular engineer and chemist has been working with his crew on gene therapy. They are growing brain tissues from human stem cells. Stem cells are found everywhere in the body and have the ability to replicate. These are the cells which fill the injuries and heel the broken bones. They remain inactive, in non-dividing state until activated by a stimulus.

The project is known as Brain Initiative, started by Obama administration to get better understanding of brain functioning and to discover mysteries of brain disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The end goal of the project is to replace the dead brain cells with human cultivated living cells.

“The largest structures we’ve made are on the order of half a billion cells, which is larger than a mouse brain. It’s not really a macho size thing yet; it’s just exploiting the ability to get flow through capillaries. We can now get most of the major cell types of the brain. We can make oligodendrocytes, which wrap the myelin sheath that insulates neural connections. We can make endothelial cells, which is really critical, because if you don’t have endothelium, you don’t have capillaries. We’re trying to make larger, more complex organoids that have good blood flow.” Church.

Brain in plate. Brain organoids grown by Gorge McDonald Church.

He was asked “are there applications of these brain organoids to Artificial Intelligence?” In reply to this he said that the human brain is pretty far ahead of silicon-based computing systems except for specialized tasks like information retrieval or math or chess …

Well, a computer playing chess or mining information from a pictures and draw certain perceptions was a fiction in previous century which is a reality now. Today’s fictions are tomorrow’s reality. I am sure our grandchildren or our children if not us will read the headlines one day that brain organoids are implanted in an AI body and it is now like a real living creature. I hope they won’t start with Homo sapiens immediately, they would create AI pets or sex toys first but sky is the limit and there is no sky (the blueish in the morning and the reddish in the evening that you see is just a reflection of light in atmosphere).

Well, a computer playing chess or mining information from a pictures and draw certain perceptions was a fiction in previous century which is a reality now. Today’s fictions are tomorrow’s reality. I am sure our grandchildren or our children if not us will read the headlines one day that brain organoids are implanted in an AI body and it is now like a real living creature. I hope they won’t start with Homo sapiens immediately, they would create AI pets or sex toys first but sky is the limit and there is no sky (the blueish in the morning and the reddish in the evening that you see is just a reflection of light in atmosphere).