Newer technologies such
as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, 3D printing, mixed
reality that combines virtual reality and augmented reality, and blockchain are
not only disrupting and transforming business models and the lives of
individuals, but also ushering in the so-called gig economy which envisages an
environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations engage
independent workers on short-term contracts. Lounge takes a look at how
these technologies will affect us in the years to come.New
technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics and automation, 3D
printing, mixed reality and blockchain are disrupting and transforming business
models.
There are three broad reasons for AI’s
phenomenal growth in the last two-three years.
AI comes of age .It was only in December
that the US’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) announced
that a solar system with as many planets as our own had been discovered with
the help of its Kepler space telescope and AI.
Closer home, Microsoft
and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics are
using an AI-based sowing app that is expected to help about 4,000 farmers in
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka during the kharif season. HDFC Bank’s AI chatbot
Eva, built by Senseforth AI Research, now works with the Google Assistant in
Indian English. It has already answered more than five million user queries
with more than 85% accuracy, according to the bank.
These are simply cases
in point across sectors to demonstrate that the world of AI, which is broadly
defined as the desire to replicate human intelligence in machines, has matured
greatly. There are three broad
reasons for AI’s phenomenal growth in the last two-three years. First is the
rapid advancement in machine- and deep-learning algorithms. Second is the
availability of humongous amounts of data (hence known as Big Data) on which
these algorithms can be trained. Third is the dramatic increase in computing
power that includes more efficient computer processing units and graphic
processing units.
The results are
visible. In December, Alphabet-owned AI firm DeepMind announced that its
AlphaZero algorithm took just 4 hours to learn all chess rules and defeat the
world’s strongest open-source chess engine, Stockfish. AlphaZero, which was
modelled on DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero computer programme, vanquished a
world-champion programme in each game of chess, shogi (Japanese chess) and the
Chinese game, Go, within 24 hours.
Since automation and AI
are better than humans with routine tasks, it has understandably given rise to
the fear that automation and AI will take away our jobs and become more
intelligent than human beings. In his 2006 book, The Singularity Is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology, American author and futurist Ray Kurzweil forecast
that AI would surpass humans. By 2099, he added, machines would have attained a
legal status equal to that of humans.
Technology luminaries,
including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and even Stephen Hawking, have expressed fear
that robots with AI could rule mankind. Those who believe that AI machines can
be controlled include Mark Zuckerberg and Kurzweil.
The fact is that
despite the advancements in AI, it is still nothing like what we see in sci-fi
movies. The benefits, though, include smart personal assistants, AI-powered
chatbots, better search engines, more efficient translation tools, driverless
cars and trucks, and predictive healthcare. Research released by Accenture Plc.
also reveals that AI could add $957 billion, or Rs60,68,150 crore, to the
Indian economy by changing the nature of work to create better outcomes for
businesses and society.
So though it may be
difficult to predict how AI will affect us 25-30 years from now, we may want to
sharpen our focus on the many positives it has introduced so far.
3D printing, which has been around for over 30 years,
is now used not only to make jewellery and toothbrushes, but also football
boots, racing-car parts etc.
3D printing goes big In 2014, a team of
Indian plastic surgeons at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical
Education and Research (Jipmer) in Puducherry restored the deformed skull of a
three-year-old girl to its original shape with the help of a 3D printer that
was sourced from a Mumbai-based 3D printer maker, Divide By Zero Technologies.
In July, Jipmer purchased its own 3D printer, according to a report that month
in The Hindu.
3D printing, which has
been around for over 30 years, is now used not only to make jewellery and
toothbrushes, but also football boots, racing-car parts, food products, guns,
human organs, houses and aircraft parts.
3D printing belongs to
a class of techniques known as additive manufacturing, or building objects
layer by layer. The most common household 3D-printing process involves a “print
head”, which allows for any material to be extruded or squirted through a
nozzle. To be sure, there’s also the concept of 4D printing, which allows
materials to “self-assemble” into 3D structures, and which was initially
proposed by Skylar Tibbits of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
in April 2013.
According to
6Wresearch, India’s 3D printer market is projected to touch $79 million by
2021. Expected domestic production, low cost of manufacturing and increasing
penetration across various applications, coupled with the Make In India
campaign, are the growth triggers. In India, 3D printers have been used in medical,
architecture, automotive, industrial, aerospace, military and other
applications, where automotive application accounts for the largest revenue and
volume share.
Globally, the 3D
printer market is expected to be worth $32.78 billion by 2023, according to
research firm Markets and Markets. The aerospace and defence vertical,
according to the report, held the largest share of the global 3D printing
market in 2016.
Nasa, for instance, is
testing engines with 3D-printed parts to pare the costs of powering its most
powerful rocket—the Space Launch System (SLS)—while the US army is teaming up
with the Marines to develop 3D-printed drones that could be made from scratch
right near the battlefield.
Globally established
companies such as Stratasys and Optomec have footprints in India through
partnerships and alliances, notes the above-cited 6Wresearch note. Major
companies active in the Indian 3D-printing market space are Altem Technologies,
Imaginarium, Brahma 3, KCbots and JGroup Robotics.
Companies like
Microsoft, with its HoloLens, and US-based start-up Magic Leap are increasingly
betting on the melding of technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual
reality (VR) with the real world to give users and businesses a world of
so-called “mixed” reality (MR) or “blended” reality concepts.
The belief is that
these technologies have the potential to become the next big computing
platform.
While VR is all about a
world created solely on computers or online, AR still deals with the real world
and has elements of the virtual world built atop it, akin to layers of
information. An example of AR is Pokémon GO, a game that allows you to capture
virtual creatures at real-world locations—it has been downloaded 800 million
times. While its popularity has waned since its release in 2016, Pokémon GO
nevertheless underscored the potential of AR. MR mixes both realities
(VR and AR) in a bid to capture the best of both worlds. And it has caught the
attention of investors.
No one, for instance,
has seen the Magic Leap One goggles but for some photographs of the forthcoming
product on the company’s website. A first model aimed specifically at
developers is expected to be available early this year. Yet, the company has
already managed to raise investments of almost $2 billion, notably from Google,
Alibaba Group, Temasek and JP Morgan Investment Management.
Magic Leap credits its
differentiation to its photonic lightfield chip, which relies on silicon
photonics, wherein data is transferred faster between computer chips by optical
rays.
Microsoft, which has
adopted cloud in a big way, already has Kinect—an input device that senses
motion and allows users to play games with gestures and spoken commands. It is
now betting big on its MR holographic computer, HoloLens.
HoloLens has sensors
that allow you to use your gaze to move the cursor when you want to select
holograms. You can use gestures to select and size items, and drag and drop
holograms. You can also speak directly to the virtual assistant Cortana. In
2017, Microsoft changed the name of the backend that helps run HoloLens from
Windows Holographic to Windows Mixed Reality. The company has partnered with
companies such as Samsung, Acer and HP for its MR headsets. Big companies in
the mixed reality market include HTC, Intel, Magic Leap, Microsoft, Facebook,
Google and Samsung.
Research firm Gartner
Inc. predicts that by 2019, AR, VR and MR solutions will be evaluated and
adopted in 20% of large-enterprise businesses.
The global MR market
size is expected to reach $2.8 billion by 2023, according to research firm
Reportbuyer.com. The MR market, notes the report titled “Global Mixed Reality
Market Analysis (2017-2023)”, will witness rapid growth due to increasing
demand for innovative and wearable products. The aerospace and defence sectors
could use MR products for training programmes. The technology can be used
effectively in schools since it provides 3D images, leading to an interactive
learning experience, the report adds.The world’s biggest cryptocurrency,
bitcoin, may have risen around 20-fold since the start of 2017—from $1,000 to
almost $20,000 on some exchanges—before taking a dip, making it a very volatile
investment. In contrast, the adoption of blockchain, the underlying technology
that powers bitcoin, has been a stable exercise by industries across the world.
Banks and financial institutions have clearly been the first movers.
Blockchain In 2016, Visa Inc. said
it was planning to use blockchain to improve its digital payments processes. In
November, Visa rolled out the first, pilot phase of its blockchain-based
business-to-business payments service, B2B Connect. The platform, developed
with the blockchain start-up Chain, is also designed to ensure secure, yet
transparent, payments between enterprises. ICICI Bank, India’s largest private
bank, too said it was gearing up to use blockchain technology to make banking
more secure.
Blockchain is a
distributed ledger shared via a peer-to-peer network that maintains an
expanding list of data records. Each participant has a copy of the ledger’s
data, reflecting the most recent transactions or changes. Thus, blockchain
increases transparency, reduces duplication of access to data or checking of
data, and results in scalability and lower costs. The benefits of blockchain,
though, are not restricted to banking and financial institutions.
The world’s largest
mining firm by market value, BHP Billiton, is using Ethereum (a blockchain
custom-built by Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation) to improve its
supply-chain processes by recording “movements of wellbore rock and fluid
samples and better secure the real-time data that is generated during
delivery”.
Even governments have
realized the value of blockchains. Australia Post has set out a plan to use
blockchain in election voting while Estonia is already using blockchain in its
tax and business registration systems. And so are countries like the US, UK,
Russia, Sweden and Singapore. Smart contracts, or the
possibility of capturing contracts of law in software code on a blockchain, may
have far-reaching consequences, according to experts. A large number of
blockchain initiatives may fail, say experts, but they believe blockchain is
here to stay, especially since it’s now being powered by AI too.
For instance,
SingularityNET plans to allot AGI (artificial general intelligence) tokens to
enable AI service transactions globally. SingularityNET aims to become the key
protocol for networking AI and machine-learning tools to form a coordinated
artificial general intelligence. To accomplish this, the SingularityNET
platform must be powered by a utility token that is tailored to enabling its
core functionality. The SingularityNET token “AGI” is structured to enable four
key mechanisms: transactions, settlements, incentives and governance.
Robots already deliver pizzas and packages, they serve
in warehouses, there are assistive robots taking care of the elderly.
Robotics and automation
On 25 October, a
humanoid called Sophia (designed to look like the late actor Audrey Hepburn by
her creator David Hanson, the founder of Hanson Robotics) was awarded full
citizenship of Saudi Arabia. Most people who read
this news item, or have seen sci-fi movies such as Star Wars, The Terminator,
Transformers, Surrogates or The Matrix, may be tempted to believe that robots
and computers will soon rule over, or even smother, humans. On the contrary,
though, even an advanced robot such as Asimo took years to learn to walk
without tripping, something infants learn rapidly due to the highly evolved
human brain. Nevertheless, most humans fear that smart automation, intelligent
software bots and brainy robots can take away our jobs—sooner or later. They
have reason to believe this. Robots already deliver
pizzas and packages; they serve in warehouses; there are assistive robots
taking care of the elderly; there are robots making hamburgers and others, like
the Roomba robots, that mop floors; and there are software bots writing
articles and movie scripts. In his book The Rise Of
The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Employment, Martin Ford suggests
that while all jobs are at risk of automation, it is the “routine” and
“predictable” jobs that will be affected the most. Further, the field of
robotics is being enhanced by advancements in AI. Hanson Robotics is already
partnering with SingularityNET, which enables AI-as-a-service to ensure that
anyone can use AI services easily. And in January 2017,
the European Union introduced a draft report suggesting that autonomous bots
might, in the future, be granted the status of “electronic persons”—a legal
definition conferring certain “rights and obligations” that was first proposed
in May 2016. A decision is yet to be taken.
Researchers are trying
to address these issues, in part, by proposing human-robot collaboration in the
workplace, or even a tax on robots that replace humans. Some researchers are
even mooting the idea of a universal basic income for humans who lose their
jobs to robots. Moreover, there are
people who are convinced that countries should advance international
deliberations over “lethal autonomous weapons systems”, aka fully autonomous
weapons or killer robots. The reason is that if autonomous robots keep humans
out of the loop, it could lead to indiscriminate killings, especially on
battlefields, since robots cannot take moral decisions.
Read also
Newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, 3D printing, mixed reality that combines virtual reality and augmented reality, and blockchain are not only disrupting and transforming business models and the lives of individuals, but also ushering in the so-called gig economy which envisages an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations engage independent workers on short-term contracts. Lounge takes a look at how these technologies will affect us in the years to come.New technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics and automation, 3D printing, mixed reality and blockchain are disrupting and transforming business models.