I guess a few of us are old enough to remember the 1989 film, “Back to the Future Part II,” where Doc Brown takes Marty McFly to the year 2015 so that he can prevent his kids from making terrible mistakes. The world in 2015 in this film is full of flying cars, robots, and the famous hover board. As it turns out, the only thing that turned out to be correct was the hoverboard prediction, as a company called Hendo just recently launched the world’s first hoverboard on Kickstarter (http://tinyurl.com/n92v8zv). There are a few weeks left in 2014, so perhaps we will see a flying car before the end of the year. Maybe.
One thing that does remain a constant is that experts are always trying to make predictions about what the world will be like in the future. Robots seem to have a permanent space in these predictions and a recent Bloomberg article (http://tinyurl.com/lhw3laz) says that according to a consensus of AI experts there is a 10% probability that human level machine intelligence will be reached by the year 2022, 50% by 2040, and 90% by 2075. All this recent forecasting has stirred up a reaction from Elon Musk (billionaire Paypal and Tesla founder), who claims that super intelligent machines represent the single biggest threat to humanity. Consequently, Musk has been buying into AI companies so he can keep on eye on them.
The bottom line is that we all have to choose who to believe and to what extent. As for me, I think that the more technology advances, the more accurate the predictions will become. “Back to the Future Part II” was filmmaking, but today’s leading AI experts are not making predictions to sell tickets. I do believe that the innovation curve is exponential and change will happen more rapidly and more dramatically in the near future. Let’s just all hope that the future will reveal more things like the hoverboard as opposed to psycho, killer robots featured in the famous “Terminator” series.
Robot Brains Catch Humans in 25 Years, Then Speed Right On By, Bloomberg, Tom Randall, Nov 10, 2014
For more information about the Corvinus Global Business blogger, go to https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmjackson1.
Blog 3
