Team Partners Telecommunications

Artificial Intelligence, the now and next…

Posted on Jan 18, 2020

Reading back over last month’s blog, in which we looked at the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through to the 1970’s and ‘80s, it seems extraordinary that the history and development of computers, and therefore AI is such a recent thing. 

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s there were a host of learned papers, all pointing towards the development of sentient computers but it was during the decades on either side of the millennium that the actual milestones, the practice rather than the theorising, took place. 

There will be few who were alive at the time who will not have heard of IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’ computer and how it beat world champion, Gary Kasparov, at chess. Fewer will have registered Dragon System’s speech recognition software, implemented on ‘Windows’ that same year, but it was an important step. For all the progress, though, memory, or the lack of it was still a hold-up. But not for long…

There’s a thing called Moore’s Law. It’s more of an observation than a mathematical law, but in essence what it says in its original format is that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, with the cost of computers being halved. Put slightly differently Moore tells us that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to double every couple of years whilst, at the same time, we’ll pay less for them. It was Moore’s law catching up that enabled Deep Blue to do its thing, and it’s the constant application of Moore’s Law that is enabling Artificial Intelligence to make the extraordinary strides it is. We live in an age of what is called ”big data”, which means that there is just so much information being collected and made available that us mere humans haven’t a hope of making sense of it all. Our computers, on the other hand, now have the ability to lap it all up, make sense of it and learn from it all. It may be the application of brute force to crunch all the numbers, but it’s working.

So, the future…hang on, how about the present? If you’re a football fan why not re-play a recent game shoulder to shoulder with your favourite player? Yes, you can. Apparently a number of clubs have teamed up with tech companies to allow this. Simply place lots and lots of hi-res volumetric cameras around your pitch, get them to film in 3D and suddenly you have a player’s eye view. Now select your player and you can have a 360 degree view of the game. Thanks to AI.

If football isn’t your game, how about tennis? Wimbledon uses AI to capture the best bits of each game and package them as highlights within two minutes of a match ending. It’s editing, but not as we know it. Then there’s rugby. Working with the RFU, IBM has created a database of players and teams on its AI cloud platform, all aimed at making England Rugby’s match day hub more of a personal thing for each person who logs on. Clubs are increasingly using AI to predict their oppositions game plays and behaviour, their attitude and reactions, all by feeding in every bit of video and information about them that’s available and using AI to sort through and identify the patterns.

There’s a term for all of this. It’s “deep learning” and it’s everywhere. It powers Google’s search engine, Facebook’s automatic face recognition tagging, Apple’s voice assistant, Amazon’s shopping recommendations and Tesla’s self-drive cars. It worried Stephen Hawking. It worries in much the same way as the Spinning Jenny and Railways did. Can we handle a computer with emotions and the ability to act on them? It’s the big question and it’s one that can be faced with either, or both, fear and hope. The threat is the end of our working world as we know it, but technology always changes life and as life changes so do the skills needed to stay on top of it. With technology changing so fast education has to be hugely flexible and AI can help in that. Social skills will be foundational in securing ongoing security. Empathy and the ability to interact with other humans will be a skill no machine can replicate. It will be an interesting time…