A recent Wall Street Journal article offered a “tipping point” thought. The number of transistors on a chip will exceed the number of brain cells in humans by 2018. Does this mean that humans will face their biggest test when computers surpass human intellectual capabilities? Some think so.
We all know that the movie Avatar was not possible when the project to make the film started. They knew they would have the capability by the time they would need it in the production sequence.
Siri can already detect emotions. Amazon’s Echo can do that as well. One of my previous blogs about 2001 Space Odyssey and HAL (which by the way is the initials for IBM indexed over by one letter) showed these future capabilities … even though it was more about sensing intent and deciding whether that intent was permissible or not.
We have been following the idea of human emoting robots. We will receive some of them late this year and experiment with emoting robots that work with customers to explain their bills. There are a host of them … coming soon to a store near you. These are computers that respond to emotions and appear to emote. They read facial expressions or perhaps the patterns in our speech. That really doesn’t sound that far-fetched now does it? Then, what about automated responses to messages sent to you by customers? Why is my bill so high? We have that application running in call centers and online. We even have automated video movie explanations.
For myself, I am going to get very upset if the computer feeds me psychobabble questions like “how did that make you feel?” I think I would become very nervous if it asked me “was that good for you?” How about “wassup?” and it begins to converse with you like a real person and then ends with “whatever.”
I, Robot, was a film that forecast what might happen by 2035. I think they missed that by 10 years for sure based upon the latest computation and robotic innovations. R2D2 seems only a decade away at most. Meanwhile cars will drive themselves this year. Fatal collisions will be almost impossible to imagine at some time in the future. What are all those insurance industries going to do?
Meanwhile most in the energy industry attempt to refine what we used to think was the customer experience. That experience is changing at lightning speed. What you thought was true last year is almost irrelevant for the future. Stop driving your companies using the rear view mirror as a guide. Even if you have one of the auto-stop features in your autopilot.