The beauty of innovation; good or bad?

Before I take a deep dive into this topic, let's first look at the definition of innovation. According to Wikipedia, "Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services." To be honest, I didn't actually know that's what it means before now, I mean I had a vague idea of it but at least I know the definition now. From that definition, it's safe to say that innovation is the father of all technologies we have today, just as how necessity is the mother of invention

Innovation is behind every good thing we have today. From technological innovation (smartphones, the internet) to medical innovation (curing diseases, improving quality of life, etc), it's obvious that innovation is key to solving major challenges facing us in the world today, but at the same time it also creates new problems for us which will then require another set of innovation to solve it, it's a vicious cycle! I see innovation as a double edge sword; we can defeat our problems with it but there's also the likelihood that we can get hurt by it

For this post, I would like to focus more on artificial intelligence (AI) as that's what is trending in the world today. Once upon a time, AI was something that existed in science fiction and a typical example of that is Ironman's Jarvis, which I believe most of you are familiar with from Marvel movies (like Avengers). Anyway, AI has actually been in existence for a while but it just blew up a few years ago after openAI released chatGPT to the world. From there, we have basically gone down the rabbit hole of AI as new tools keep popping up every day.

Now, a lot of tech giants have their own AI (large language model). Microsoft got copilot, Google has Gemini (previously Bard) and then we have the likes of Perplexity, Claude and Devin. Sure, AI is fantastic as it helps to make a lot of things easier. These days, some of us no longer use Google as frequently as before when we want to learn something new because AI gives you direct answers without the need of scrolling through several websites digging for the right answer. Of course, there's a downside to this as it has made people lazier, especially students.

Gone are the days when students spend time researching a topic for their assignment, now they just feed the question to one of those AI models and it spits out the answer, which they can tweak to their liking. Most communities on Hive have outrightly banned AI-generated content which is the right thing to do because AI content defeats the whole idea behind Hive. Anybody can just give a topic to AI and it generates a full post with varying lengths, imagine what this platform would look like if everyone were doing that.

Anyway, that's just the basic application of AI that everyone is familiar with. Now, let's look at the aspect a lot of people don't know about and is also one of the major disadvantages of AI; job replacement. Do you know that right now in some farms in Europe and Asia, robots equipped with AI are harvesting fruits? I saw a video of it a few months ago on YouTube, a robot picking ripe fruits from trees with high precision. AI helps it detect which fruits are ripe and ready for harvest. This was a job that was done by humans before, but now robots are doing it.

That video was posted over 3 years ago, can you imagine how sophisticated that robot might be now if they have been working on it since then? You might argue that the robot will be too expensive for most farms to own but what happens in maybe 10 years from now? Remember that mobile phones and computers were once very expensive but today, almost everyone around the world can afford one. Every day, relentless innovation is been done in the tech sector which pushes boundaries and creates a better future for us all. It leads to economic growth by creating new jobs and industries but at the same time, it's automating already existing jobs and displacing a lot of people out of jobs.

Before now, content writers used to be in high demand but now that AI is in existence, why will a business owner bother to pay someone to create content for their business when they can do it themselves for free with AI? I guess the scary part of AI is not that it's going to totally replace jobs but it will reduce the availability of jobs. What do I mean? If a business owner needed to employ 10 workers, they might just employ 4 or 5 people and make them more productive with AI which will help to automate a lot of processes. Again, this is already happening and I have a good example earlier with the video of a robot picking fruits.

That's an AI robot that's being developed by openAI, the creators of chatGPT (I wonder what they are cooking this time). For me, innovation has a limit and I think we are already going too far. Do you know that scientists are currently working on a cure for ageing? They basically want to make us immortal, but that's a topic for another day (you can go research more on this). Then we have Elon Musk on the other hand with a lot of crazy innovations. Mars colonization, chips in the brain (you get to become a Jedi!) and so on. Then we also have a lot of hidden research going on around the world and conspiracy theorists are just having a field day.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other companies involved in AI technology are currently working on something called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It's basically software with human-like intelligence, just think of it as AI on steroids (a very high amount!). The current AI models we have now are all trained using an algorithm for several years but with AGI, the AI would have self-awareness, consciousness, and the ability to learn on its own. It's said that AGI would have intelligence equal to or greater than a human! What's next? It will probably start looking for ways to take over the world and enslave humans (just like what happened with Ultron in Avengers and then the Sentinels in X-Men).

Considering that a lot of innovations we are having today were first seen in movies (AI, virtual and augmented realities, self-driving cars), then it's safe to say that we are also going to have some of the problems brought about by these innovations in movies. The robot in the last YouTube video already looks like it has AGI (it is aware of its surroundings!) but I don't openAI has achieved it yet, they probably might be able to in a few years from now. I can already imagine the world being overtaken by self-conscious robots equipped with AGI, it might not happen even in the next decade but with the way things are going, it's just a matter of time.

This is my entry for April Inleo Prompt, day 2. Click the link to also participate.

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