Anderson Thees
Several years ago, Marcelo Sales took a year-long sabbatical to help scope out the next big thing. Sales is a prominent entrepreneur in Brazil who co-founded Movile, now one of Latin America’s largest tech startups, back in 2008. As he traveled through Asia and Europe, he studied robots and built his own robot, became intrigued with 3D printers, and more. Long story short, Sales realized that A.I. was something truly powerful that would change the world.
Fast-forward nearly five years to 2020, and we now know that’s certainly the case. A.I. in the form of perceptual smart machines (along with blockchain and IoT) was a key trend that Gartner spotted back in April 2016 - calling it “one of the most disruptive technologies over the next 10 years.”
During the annual BayBrazil Conference, which was newnormally virtual this year and spread out over the late summer, Sales and other renowned A.I. experts gathered online to discuss the tectonic shifts the pandemic has only accelerated tied to A.I. innovation solving huge challenges in a world that’s barely recognizable after the chaos of 2020.
Here are three key insights from them about what’s coming next for A.I.:
It’ll “Take a Village” to Add Humanity Back into A.I.-led Decision Making The ability for today’s smart machines to process massive amounts of data and find patterns or discrepancies that help humans to more rapidly diagnose patients, discover potential life-saving treatments, prevent quite costly money laundering, or unearth the most relevant legal precedents in stacks of law books is impressive.
“Machines are, in some sense, really good at doing pattern recognitions,” said Jure Leskovec, chief scientist at Pinterest and Stanford professor, during his BayBrazil Conference fireside chat. “In healthcare, a certain doctor can only examine evidence and make so many diagnoses in his or her lifetime,” but Leskovec
Pushed further on that topic and how to instill a sense of humanity across sectors that are increasingly being impacted by A.I. technologies, Leskovec said: “What we’re realizing, and I think it really brings people from different disciplines together, is A.I. technology isn’t developed and used in isolation or by itself, apart from the society to which it belongs.
A.I.’s Role in Solving Widespread Diversity
Issues, Human Bias and Distrust According to Harvard Business Review last year, “human biases are well-documented, from implicit association tests that demonstrate biases that we may not even be aware of, to field experiments that demonstrate how much these biases can affect outcomes.”
One classic example is longtime issues with facial and voice recognition and its accuracy across various ethnicities. As Steve Lohr wrote in 2018 for The New York Times: “Facial recognition is accurate if you’re a white guy.” Lohr’s story cited research from the M.I.T. Media Lab that found when the person in a photo is a white man, facial-recognition software was 99 percent accurate, but there were an escalating number of errors encountered as skin types grew darker via a study on people of different races and gender.
“The ability for today’s smart machines to process massive amounts of data and find patterns or discrepancies that help humans to more rapidly diagnose patients, discover potential life-saving treatments, prevent quite costly money laundering, or unearth the most relevant legal precedents in stacks of law books is impressive”
Sales’ engineering team at CyberLabs, in partnership with academic and corporate A.I. labs in Brazil, set out to solve this problem for Brazilians, specifically. No other organization had aimed at addressing the challenge for Brazil, which is one of the world’s most diverse populations.
They started with a major data-collection effort across different data sources for anonymized Brazilian faces. Over three years, the team captured more than 13 million Brazilian faces from different angles in order to feed and train a facial-recognition algorithm created just for Brazil.
Now, they’re in the midst of wrapping up the analysis and teaching their A.I. engine the various Brazilian dialects for voice recognition, speech to text, and text to speech to invent a voice D.N.A. database that can identify a specific Brazilian’s voice in just seconds.
“Brazil has a lot of issues with security and trust,” said Sales. “One of the major problems we’re attacking now is to create a digital database and algorithm to identify Brazilians in a way that people can trust them to buzz them into building, or to securely purchase products or services online or in stores.”
A.I.’s Future Will Impact Almost Everyone’s Jobs and Create New Business Models
In a nutshell, yes, some jobs will definitely be going away as a result of A.I.’s ascension, according to Konstanze Frishchen, who heads Ashoka’s Global Technology & Humanity work. And it will cause “tectonic shifts” across all types of industries.
For example, “A.I. has huge implications on the profession of doctors because you could argue that the machine will know way more than the doctor with their ‘old A.I.,’ their brain, and what they learn in medical school and their own biases, their own set of limitations,” said Frischen.
“It’s not just the manual or administrative jobs that will go away, but the more complicated and sophisticated jobs will also go away or change - and community will perhaps matter even more instead of less,” said Frischen
Frischen and others who participated in the roundtable discussion debated new business models that don’t necessarily cut out humans from getting a cut of the action. For example, one in which patients, doctors, and nurses partake in training A.I. to make better medical diagnostics and predictions. Frischen predicted there could be a new Spotify-like model that pays out royalties for these experts participating in the training of A.I., so they have a stake in it too versus a “winner-takes-it-all” model for A.I. that rises to the top.
One thing is for sure, the early signs of A.I. and associated research dates back to 1956, four years before the path towards the internet age began in 1960. Like the internet revolution, A.I. is now poised to change everything, and its influence is only accelerating faster now.
