Productivity and technology

The AI pacman is gobbling up the medical and finance industries

The Bob Pritchard Column 

The most exciting, far reaching and awe-inspiring technology advances in recent times have been in healthcare, the financial area and artificial intelligence which is driving much of this dramatic change.   AI is impacting nearly every industry imaginable. Intelligence and consciousness are prerogatives of the living, and the inevitability of their existence in machines is hard for most of us to understand.

 

We need to understand that AI is dramatically altering both medicine and finance. 

While the industries are indispensable to our economies and to our lives, many people that work in them, however, are replaceable with AI guided robots performing everything from routine medical functions to major operations and Blockchain absolutely decimating the finance, insurance, banking, share trading and associated industries.

 

 

Let’s begin with the automated diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. IBM’s artificial intelligence machine, Watson, is now as good as a professional radiologist when it comes to diagnosis, and it’s also been compiling 30 billion medical images to aid in specialized treatment for image heavy fields like pathology and dermatology.  Cardiology is also being overhauled with the advent of artificial intelligence. It used to take doctors nearly an hour to quantify the amount of blood transported with each heart contraction, and it now takes only 15 seconds.  With these computers in major hospitals and clinics, doctors can process almost 260 million images a day in their respective fields, which means finding skin cancers, blood clots, and infections all with unprecedented speed and accuracy, not to mention billions of dollars saved in research and maintenance.

 

Currently, aside from Blockchain, there are almost 15,000 startups working to actively disrupt finance. They are creating computer-generated trading and investment models that blow those crafted by their human counterparts out of the water. Many major hedge funds are already cutting staff. The 100 expensive senior executives in the even more expensive suits who can’t talk business except in expensive, elite restaurants are just 5 minutes from being replaced by one scruffy, personality deprived techie whose normal lunch is coffee and a bag of crisps.

 

The result is billions of dollars made with fewer people, greater certainty, and much more comfortable work attire.

 

So where do we go from here?  At least 40% of U.S. jobs can be swallowed by artificial intelligence machines and if we aren’t careful about the degree to which we automate them, we are looking at an incredibly serious domestic threat.   

Get excited about what AI can do for us, and think very deeply about how it can integrate with us, otherwise we could have major issues.

A hotel run almost entirely by robots is expanding internationally

The Bob Pritchard Byte

In Sasebo, Japan, a hotel run almost entirely by robots has been so successful in the last two years that owners are to open 100 more locations. The initial aptly named Weird Hotel is part of an amusement park but business has been so good that they plan to expand internationally within the next five years.
 
The huge saving in labor cost keeps the hotel affordable. They plan to add 1,000 more similar hotels in the future with robots making up 90% of the total staff.
 

 

 

Having robots in charge throughout the hotel makes it the most efficient hotel in the world.  To check in, arriving guests can either talk with a humanoid robot who speaks Japanese or a dinosaur who speaks English. To make sure no one steals the prehistoric receptionist — or any other robot — humans are also on staff as security, making beds and monitoring the hotel at all times.

 

Apart from the  life-sized dinosaur in the lobby there is  a roving recycling bin for guests to keep the hotel tidy.

 

The hotel staff waits patiently for guests to complete the check-in process. (They have to. They are robots.)   Floor robots, also becoming very popular in Japanese airports to assist weaker travelers, carry guests' luggage to their rooms. Guests can leave their luggage in a cloak room, manned by a cloak room robot who can store unused luggage until checkout.  

 

Each room comes stocked with Tuly, a hotel concierge robot that can help guests find nearby restaurants, recommend events, can control room temperature, change channels on the TV and answer any other question you may have.

 

For just $80, the general public can spend a night with the dinosaurs and the robots.

 

No one thought a supermarket could be run entirely by robots  and AI until Amazon Go, then insurance companies came along, autonomous public transportation and now the hospitality industry is joining the long list.

 

We're going to become caretakers for the robots. That's what the next generation of work is going to be. Let's not kid ourselves here, robots already run most of our world. We'll be their butlers soon enough

 

This is why I love what I do!

Thanks Tim Buzza

15 predictions by Bill Gates 18 years ago

No. 1: Price-comparison sites.

“Automated price comparison services to find the cheapest product in all categories.”

• You can search on NexTag and PriceGrabber specifically to compare prices.

No. 2: Mobile devices.

“Small devices will you to constantly stay in touch, check the news, check flights, get financial information, do business from wherever you are.

• Smartphones, and now smartwatches, do all of this.

No. 3: Instant payments, financing and better healthcare through the web.

“People will pay bills, manage their finances, and communicate with their doctors over the internet.”

• ZocDoc makes finding a doctor and scheduling easier. One Medical and Forward offer monthly memberships for online and data-driven healthcare.  You can borrow money online through Lending Club and make payments through PayPal and Venmo.

No. 4: Personal assistants and IoT.

“Personal companions’ will sync all your devices and allow them to exchange data. The device will check your email or notifications, and instantly present the information that you need.

• Smart devices like Nest collect data on your daily routines and automatically adjust your house’s temperature.   Voice-controlled devices, like Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home, can read your email to you or guide you through recipes as you cook.

No. 5: Online home-monitoring.

"Constant video feeds of your house will become common, informing you when somebody visits while you are not home.”

• Dropcam’s home-surveillance camera, Ring’s smart doorbell camera lets you remotely see who is at your door. PetCube lets you play with your pets while away.

No. 6: Social media.

“Private websites will allow you to chat with friends and plan for events.”

• Two billion people use Facebook and Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and others that cover this prediction.

No. 7: Automated promotional offers.

“Software that knows you’ve booked a trip and can suggest activities, discounts, offers, and cheaper prices at your destination.”

•  Expedia and Kayak offer deals based on your past purchase data. Google and Facebook offer promotional ads based on your location and interests. Airbnb offers specialized trips at destinations so you can live like a local.

No. 8: Live sports discussion sites.

“TV sports will allow you to discuss the action, and enter a relevant contests.”

• Twitter being the clear leader and streaming some games. You can leave comments in real time on sites like ESPN.

No. 9: Smart advertising.

“Devices will know your purchasing trends, and will display advertisements tailored to your preferences.”

• Online advertising services target users based on your click history, interests, and purchasing patterns.

No. 10: Links to sites during live TV.

Prediction: “Television broadcast will include links to relevant websites and content that complement what you are watching.”

• Almost every commercial has a callout asking the viewer to go to a website, follow the business on Twitter, or a scan a QR code to add it on Snapchat.

No. 11: Online discussion boards.

“Residents of cities and countries will have internet-based discussions concerning issues that affect them.

• News sites have sections for live discussions, and interactive forums. Twitter and Facebook played roles in political revolutions in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US.

No. 12: Interest-based online sites.

“Online communities will be influenced by your interest, not your location.”

• News sites and online communities focus on single topics, include separate verticals, offering more in-depth coverage on a given topic, focusing on interests rather than who you know or where you are.

No. 13: Project-management software.

“Project managers will be able to go online, describe the project, and receive recommendations for available people who would fit their requirements.”

• Tons of workflow software in the enterprise space revolutionizing how you recruit, form teams, and assign work to others.

No. 14: Online recruiting.


Prediction: “People will find employment opportunities online by declaring their interest, needs, and specialized skills.”

• LinkedIn allows users to upload résumés and find jobs based on interests and needs.

No. 15: Business community software.


 “Companies will bid on jobs, be it a construction project, a movie production, or an advertising campaign. This will be efficient for outsourcing work, looking for new clients, and being a go-to provider for the said service.”

• Users can reach out and start conversations that could lead to bigger projects directly within their apps. Sites like Upwork, enables connection with freelance designers, writers, or engineers.

 

Bill Gates - what are the next 15 predictions In the next 15 years? 

New Cancer Cure?

The Bob Pritchard Corner 

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common cancer among young children, accounting for a quarter of all cancer cases in kids, and it has no cure. For about 85% to 90% of children, the leukemia can, however, be effectively treated through chemotherapy.

 

If it is not eliminated and comes back, it can often be fatal. Rounds of chemotherapy can buy patients time, but as the disease progresses, the periods of remission can become shorter and shorter.   The patient could receive a bone-marrow transplant, but only about half of those procedures are successful, and there is a chance that they could reject the donor cells. If that happens, chances of surviving are very small.

 

There is now a radical new option, using gene therapy to train a patient's immune system to recognize and destroy their cancer in the same way it dispatches bacteria and viruses. The strategy is the latest development in immunotherapy, a revolutionary approach to cancer treatment that uses a series of precision strikes to disintegrate cancer from within the body itself.

 

What saves the patient is an infusion of their own immune cells that are genetically modified to destroy the patient’s leukemia. With this therapy, 90% of patients go into remission. Such radical immune-based approaches were launched in 2011 with the success of intravenous drugs that loosen the brakes on the immune system so it can see cancer cells and destroy them with the same vigor with which they attack bacteria and viruses. Now, with the genetically engineered immune cells known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, doctors are crippling cancer in more precise and targeted ways than surgery, chemotherapy and radiation ever could. While the first cancer immunotherapies were broadly aimed at any cancer, experts are now repurposing the immune system into a personalized precision treatment that can not only recognize but also eliminate the cancer cells unique to each individual patient.

 

What makes immune-based therapies like CAR T cell therapy so promising--and so powerful--is that they are a living drug churned out by the patients themselves. The treatment isn't a pill or a liquid that has to be taken regularly, but a one-hit wonder that, when given a single time, trains the body to keep on treating, ideally for a lifetime.

 

This therapy is utterly transformative for this kind of leukemia and also lymphoma. Eager to bring this groundbreaking option to more patients, including those with other types of cancers, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously in July to move the therapy beyond the testing phase, during which several hundred people have been able to take advantage of it, to become a standard therapy for children with certain leukemias if all other treatments have failed.

 

Across the United States, doctors are racing to enroll people with other cancers--breast, prostate, pancreatic, ovarian, sarcoma and brain, including the kind diagnosed in Senator John McCain--in hundreds of trials to see if they will benefit from this novel approach.

 

NIH National Cancer Institute

 

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence

Musk vs. Zuckerberg: the tech heavyweights square off on the perils of artificial intelligence

From CEBIT NEWS 

“Is AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation”

In recent news, two of the biggest names in tech have been facing off in a showdown over the perils of artificial intelligence (AI). 

In one corner, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk; in the other, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. For years Musk has warned that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation”, while Zuckerberg says he is “optimistic” about the possibilities AI offers. So who is right about the perils of AI?

It’s an issue worth pondering. AI is already an integral part of our everyday lives. It’s giving us information and helping us with our daily tasks on our phones and computers, in the form of Apple’s Siri and Android’s Cortana; it’s translating languages on Google Translate; and it’s now officially better at the complex game Go than everyone else on the planet. And it’s only going to become more ubiquitous. AI is, for example, an essential component of autonomous cars, which are set to take over our roads in the near future.

But while these are positive examples of AI enhancing our lives, there are also examples of AI that make one pause, such as when Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay, resorted to spouting racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic slurs after only 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter. 

In response to one of Tay’s tweets, Musk replied, “Will be interesting to see what the mean time to Hitler is for these bots. Only took Microsoft’s Tay a day.”

So the question is: could AI eventually take over the world?

Elon Musk on AI

According to Musk, people just don’t appreciate how quickly AI technology is currently developing.

At the International Space Station (ISS) R&D conference in Washington DC on 19 July, Musk said this during a Q&A session: “I think it is difficult to appreciate just how far artificial intelligence has advanced and how fast it is advancing because we have a double exponential at work: we have exponential increase in hardware capability, and we have an exponential increase in software talent that is going into AI. So when you have a double exponential, it’s very difficult to predict. Real predictions are almost always going to be too conservative.”

His fear is not robots rising up and taking over the world; what is more likely, he thinks, is in fact much more sinister.

In an interview with CNN, Musk said: “It would be fairly obvious if you saw a robot walking around talking and behaving like a person … What’s not obvious is a huge server bank in a dark vault somewhere with intelligence that’s potential vastly greater than what a human mind can do. I mean, it’s eyes and ears would be everywhere, [in] every camera, every microphone, every device that’s network accessible. That’s really what AI means.”

He went on to say: “If we’re not careful about the advent of AI, it’s possible that there could be what’s called a ‘bad utility function’ … Humanity’s position on this planet is dependent on its intelligence, so if our intelligence is exceeded, it’s unlikely we will remain in charge of the planet.”

Mark Zuckerberg on AI

Zuckerberg’s take on the matter is decidedly sunnier.

In a Facebook Live broadcast on 20 July, he said: “If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents. And you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. I just don’t see how, in good conscience, some people can do that. I’m just much more optimistic on this, in general, than probably a lot of folks are.”

It’s no secret that Facebook are investing heavily in AI, and that Zuckerberg has ambitions for Facebook that are reliant on the technology. In December 2016 last year, Zuckerberg previewed an AI assistant he had built for his home. In the video, the assistant, Jarvis, voiced by none other than Morgan Freeman, shot t-shirts out of a cannon, spoke Mandarin with Zuckerberg’s daughter, and use facial recognition software to see that Zuckerberg’s parents were at the door.

It was also reported just this week that Facebook’s translations, of which it makes about 4.5 billion a day, are now completely powered by AI. By using neural networks that use a machine-learning component known as a long short-term memory (LTSM) network, the new system can now, according to a company blog post, “account for context, slang, typos, abbreviations and intent simultaneously”.

And just last week, Facebook were slammed in the press for an AI experiment involving chatbots that had gone slightly awry. Built by Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, the bots were designed to learn how to barter and trade by mimicking humans. But when the bots were paired against each other, they began to diverge from English into what seemed to be their own language. The headlines were sensationalist; one article read, “Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language”.

One of the researchers, Dhruv Batra, spoke out about the reporting, saying, “While the idea of AI agents inventing their own language may sound alarming/unexpected to people outside the field, it is a well-established sub-field of AI … Simply put, agents in environments attempting to solve a task will often find unintuitive ways to maximise reward. Analysing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment is NOT the same as ‘unplugging’ or ‘shutting down AI’. If that were the case, every AI researcher has been ‘shutting down AI’ every time they kill a job on a machine.”

In that same Facebook Live broadcast, Zuckerberg said, “I think that people who are naysayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios – I just, I don't understand it. I think it's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”

To which Musk retorted: “I've talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”