The 4 waves of AI and a blueprint of the future — Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

One of the most complicated and controversial issues of the future is Artificial Intelligence. There is no consensus on where it will take us and it raises more questions than it answers. As it’s a foundational technology on which a totally new and disruptive ecosystem is created, such as the Internet or the Mobile ecosystem was and it’s being questioned whether the Virtual Reality and Blockchain will be; it’s very difficult to imagine possible future scenarios. There are too many variables! Currently there are visions of dystopian futures where an AI turns against humans and utopian futures where all work that adds no value in the world is automated, and we can focus on tasks more enriching to live.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee believes in this second set of future scenarios. Lee is an investor and writer (author of AI SuperPowers) in Artificial Intelligence, where he’s one of the world’s leading experts. He currently lives in Beijing, China, and was a pioneer in the creation of continuous voice recognition systems in Carnegie Mellon, which catapulted him to a successful career as an executive in companies such as Apple, Microsoft or Google. Here you can watch his TED talk, “How AI can save our humanity”, where he explains in detail his vision based on his personal experiences.

Very powerful, isn’t it? I love the graphs that linearly describes jobs ranging from optimization to creativity or strategy, from the automatable to those where humans bring more value than a machine. And the shift generated by introducing a new variable: compassion (I would call it empathy, and he also talks about love). It’s very interesting the approach of how AI takes control of certain works, others where we merge with AI and others that will continue to be an exclusive part of the human race.

I’m also sharing a post from Singularity University where Dr. Kai-Fu Lee describes the 4 waves of Artificial Intelligence. Normally we talked about reactive AI (perceives a snapshot of the reality and acts, like IBM Deep Blue or Alpha Go), limited memory AI (perceives a small video of the reality, memorizing different variables, and making decisions such as the engines of autonomous cars or the more advanced chatbots), the Theory of Mind (in which AI understands the feelings, emotions, intentions, expectations … like the good old C3P0) and finally self-conscious AI, also called super-intelligence, that is the case of Eva in Ex Machina. Dr. Kai-Fu explains the waves in a different way, with another nomenclature: Internet AI, Business AI, Perception AI and Autonomous AI. Very interesting.

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