Posts Tagged “artificial intelligence”
In part one of, “From ‘Content is King’ to GODLIKE“, we introduced some mind-boggling facts: namely that:
- 90 percent of all content ever generated in the history of mankind, was created in the last two years
- 99 percent of all content is yet to be accessed, let alone worked, mined or analyzed.
Throw artificial intelligence (AI) in the mix and it quickly becomes apparent that we are embarking on the creation of a technology that would rival any god ever envisioned — and there have been thousands. The big difference between the gods of the past and those of the present are worth elucidating.
Traditional or conventional gods provided answers to most if not all of life’s mysteries. Of course, there are problems with that, most notably, a lack of empirical rigors to go along with the robustness of the claims. Newer gods — I’ll use Google’s search engine as an example — are empirical for sure, and use information, i.e., empirical evidence, as an epistemic foundation. From there the commonalities between the old and new intersect again since both models are pretty big on predictions (or prophecy). And before I can complete that sentence we experience yet another bifurcation with the old depending on one or another form or revealed truth and the Google god relying on inference, induction, and most recently, artificial intelligence to answer the secular prayer more commonly known simply as THE SEARCH.
God or godlike dichotomies aside, what’s a civilization to do with all this content, especially since 99 percent of it is just sitting here and there (and everywhere), doing nothing? Well, we already have the technology, i.e., Google and similar technology, to harness it. That’s one thing but taking benign predictability — the search — to profound prophecy and beyond through weird and counterintuitive correlations that provide answers even before we think of them, let alone type them into Google, is where the future of content vis-a-vis AI is heading.
The next article will get into the specifics of precisely how this might look, using everyday problems and contemplations.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
In part 2 of Content is King’ to GODLIKE, we set the table for the showdown of a new godlike figure derived from harnessing content and apply artificial intelligence to it. We also drew distinctions between traditional, personal revelation gods and their contemporary contenders. In part 3, we look at how tech can become godlike by inculcating many godlike characteristics from heretofore unworked information, and how that information, once worked, can become autonomous knowledge. And Voila! we are encroaching on the purview of a virtual deity.
To fully grasp this ascendance we must implicate some mathematics, in particular, the many algorithms that drive AI.
What are algorithms anyway? Algorithms are automated rules that aspire to one of three things, and sometimes more than just one:
- Solves problems in the most efficient way, that is, a way to accomplish a complex task quicker than any other way.
- A way to analyze data in a way that provides a degree of certainty or predictable outcomes. Note these predictions are not absolute but rather, probabilistic.
- A way to reason through a variety of data points toward the goal of sense-making.
Chances are when you do a Google search, you are engaging in at least goal 1, if not more than that. And when you go to a news portal like Cnn.com, those ads you see are being fed by algorithms that analyze your content consumption behavior which is why said ads are rarely irrelevant to you, even if you don’t click on them. Taking it one step further, you will notice ads that are not related to content you viewed recently (somewhere else) but are still very relevant. How can that be? Algorithms can correlate in ways that appear almost magical.
Algorithm definition (Wikipedia): a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
In the next article we’ll take a look at real-world applications of the nascent godlike technology being used “on you” right now.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
In “From Content is King’ to GODLIKE, Part 3,” we described the three important manifestations in which artificial intelligence (AI) manifests, and how you are already consuming and making decisions based on AI even though you probably are not aware of Big Tech Brother. In part 4, we look at this godlike creature as an omniscient force. And much like many Abrahamic gods which invoke optimal power, knowledge, and foresight, we examine implications on human free will and whether there is such a thing.
Free Will
For most, free will represents our capacity to behave autonomously within the reality we co-occupy with everyone else. (Well, at least most of us. Some people do not share our reality. They attest to seeing and hearing things that cannot be verified by anyone else. We call these things delusions. In addition, some people are seemingly incapable of showing empathy toward others. Mental health professionals designate such types as psychopaths or sociopaths.)
Many aspects of free will are strongly contested by philosophers, psychologists, and other academicians. But for our purposes, we’ll examine the ways in which content is presented to us on various digital devices such as computers, smartphones, and notebooks.
Example Number One: You are asked to come up with a name of any city of your choosing. You end up picking Philadelphia, but why did you choose Philadelphia of all the cities in your memory? What criteria did you use, or was the process random, or may be arbitrary? If recent studies are to be believed, you probably picked Philadelphia for arbitrary reasons along with a healthy helping of determinism. First, you probably are aware of several thousand cities, tens of thousands actually. But did you audition all of them when asked to pick a city? Nope. That literally takes way too much memory to pull off. So just like a computer uses RAM (rapid access memory) so does your brain. That leaves maybe a dozen or so cities that are in your own RAM, mostly cities you interact with regularly, or cities referenced very recently while consuming online (or offline) content. And now that you think about it, you know why you picked Philadelphia. You watched a Youtube video of Live Aid last night to see if the Led Zeppelin performance was as mediocre as your friend claims. Turns out, he was right.
It also turns out, based on your own account, that your selection of Philadelphia was determined by the factors you described. True. Not 100 percent deterministic but a probable choice indeed, one that becomes quite predictable, although not exact, among say, 20,000 of the most popular cities.
AI marketers know this too. So the next time you go to your favorite portal, take a look at those ads. Each one is contending for selection of your next so-called free choice.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
In part 4 of “From ‘Content is King’ to Godlike“, we exposed how determinism, or at least, deterministic factors and tendencies expose free will for the myth it really is, or at least in the context of its colloquial usage. In this segment, we’ll look at the futuristic applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and the many tech antecedents, including the many algorithm applications that inform AI that makes this probable. But before we proceed, it’s worth reiterating what algorithms are designed to do:
- Solves problems in the most efficient way, that is, a way to accomplish a complex task quicker than any other way.
- A way to analyze data in a way that provides a degree of certainty or predictable outcomes. Note these predictions are not absolute but rather, probabilistic.
- A way to reason through a variety of data points toward the goal of sense-making.
Tackling the 99 percent of content that’s just sitting there.
Inferential search engines like Google are already quite capable of quickly indexing almost infinite quantities of content and data. But it’s also worth noting that what’s actually taking place in this indexing process is a variety of sorting algorithms “under the hood” that manifest in providing “on-the-fly” search results that answer the question, i.e., our search with high precision.
From there, the future of AI is really a plethora of algorithms stacked upon each other, and at other times, complex hierarchies that are invoked by the determinations made by other algorithms appearing further upstream.
Another way of looking at this, is not by algorithms per se, though they are, but rather, by metadata, and lots of it. It is the metadata and its juxtaposition with multi-algorithms that results is bizarre predictability. Some examples:
- You have been divorced for 2 to 3 years from your wife, and find yourself buying Bud Lite at the grocery store, probably not realizing that your purchase was prompted by AI ads for that very product. Welcome to the world of semi-spooky correlation.
- You purchased a car, not online, and find yourself buying a smartphone dashboard holder from an unsolicited email. Did marketers know that you bought a car, and its year in order to determine your need for said product? Answer: Indeed they did.
- Your 54 years old and should be at a stage in your life where you are preparing for retirement. But you are being served up ads to go back to school for a graduate degree? Why on earth would that be happening? Answer: Based on your online behavior, these handy algorithms, et al. have determined — there’s that word again — it is probable that you are in the market to go back to school, and here’s the kicker, even before you knew it.
And only more of this is in store for all our futures. Question is, is this a good thing or something much more sinister, which will be the topic of our next post.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
Israeli Medtech startup Zebra Medical brings artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically detect brain anomalies. It’s like the optical character recognition (OCR) used to recognize words or other symbols when scanning a document. That’s basically how
The following content was first reported by NoCamels.com
Israeli startup Zebra Medical Vision will begin deploying its revolutionary medical imaging AI solutions in one of Israel’s largest hospitals, Tel Aviv’s Ichilov, as well as with Clalit Health Services and Maccabi Healthcare Services – Israel’s largest and second-largest HMO, respectively. The three medical entities manage some 90 percent of patients in Israel, the company said in a statement.
Zebra Medical said it received government support through grants from the Israel Innovation Authority for these projects, but did not disclose financial details.
See related story on artificial intelligence.
The company, founded in 2014 by Eyal Toledano, Eyal Gura, and Elad Benjamin, uses AI to read medical scans and automatically detect anomalies. Through its innovative development and use of 11 different algorithms, Zebra Medical can identify visual symptoms for diseases such as breast cancer, osteoporosis, fatty liver, and conditions such as vertebral fractures, aneurysms, and brain bleeds.
At Ichilov, also known as the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, which runs Israel’s largest ER section, the technology will prioritize radiologists’ worklists by scanning entire queues and flagging those that need immediate attention, thereby allowing those with life-threatening issues to be attended to more quickly.
“Emergency room patients will have their cases prioritized by AI, and if a CT scan includes a brain bleed or if a chest x-ray contains an acute condition such as pneumothorax, the patient’s imaging scan will be prioritized and placed at the top of the radiologist’s list for review, leading to earlier initiation of treatment,”
wrote Eyal Gura, Zebra Medical Vision’s co-founder and CEO, in a post announcing the partnerships.
Women who are members of the Maccabi HMO and patients of its private medical centers, meanwhile, may undergo their annual mammography exams where both expert radiologists and AI algorithms review the scans. This is in a bid to increase chances of any cancer detection earlier, and reduce unnecessary biopsies and risks of misdiagnoses.
“Traditional Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) technologies failed in the past by exposing too many false positives and we are hopeful that AI can bring new insight to the process of the ‘second-reading’ of scans,” Gura wrote.
At the Clalit HMO, Zebra will apply its technology to detect early signs of osteoporosis and heart disease in patients and alert physicians who can then apply preventative treatments.
Gura explains that the benefits will also apply to caregivers, who can work more effectively and quickly to provide care, and to the state which can manage a better healthcare budget and
“Every patient with an undetected acute condition such as brain bleed, pneumothorax, or other undetected conditions such as breast cancer, ends up (in the best case scenario) with more days hospitalized, requiring more expensive treatments, with more working days lost and a greater lack of productivity for his or her surrounding family and direct contacts,”
Gura wrote.
Gura said the company was “humbled by the opportunity” and remained
“committed to providing the best solutions to our local care providers”
“In 2020, the majority of the people around us, including our loved ones, will be impacted by the tools we are creating,” he said in the company statement. “There is nothing more satisfying than that for our team.”
The Israel Innovation Authority’s CEO Aharon Aharon said the government agency “believes digital health to be of imperative and strategic growth engine for the entire Israeli economy,” and that Zebra Medical Vision’s participation in the program “represents the flagship that will help[…] substantiate and promote digital health in Israel.”
Professor Ronni Gamzu, CEO of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said: “As a global leading ER center, we put significant emphasis on being on the cutting edge in terms of technology solutions that will empower our team. We selected Zebra-Med’s AI solutions to help our team perform faster and better diagnostics and we are certain that hundreds of thousands of patients will benefit from this new technology.”
Zebra Medical has seven CE marks for its various algorithms and 510(k) FDA clearance for one of them. It has raised over $50 million in venture funding since it was established five years ago.
In 2017, Zebra Medical partnered with multinational tech giant Google to provide its algorithms on Google Cloud, so hospitals and medical professionals in the US can access the service for $1 per scan. The company says its data and research platform has already yielded AI imaging insights for millions of scans.
The award-winning company has also been recognized as particularly innovative by Business Insider, Forbes, and Fast Company.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com
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While at times the evolution of technological innovation may seem chaotic with no clear purpose, goal or objective — many new technologies seem to come out of nowhere — there is an unseen hand at play. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations foretells of this somewhat mystical phenomenon whereby markets have their own agency, filling in market gaps as if a transcendental being was overseeing our economy. What Smith and many others who followed him neglected to notice, whether intentionally or not, is that real people with keen awareness of present conditions coupled with future need are these mysterious beings. In other words, we have discovered this unseen hand, and it’s us!
I’ll use applications that just about everyone is aware of to demonstrate who all of this works. It’s a bit of an oversimplification but appropriate for this demonstration.
- Microsoft Word released as a standalone application
- Microsoft Excel released as a standalone application
- Microsoft PowerPoint released as a standalone application
Then Microsoft Office released comprising all three with true integration that made interfacing with all three rather easy. In other words, innovations begin as separate entities but eventually and naturally consolidate into one integrated application.
I mention this because we are witnessing the same sort of stovepipe development and consolidation happening right now. However, this phenomenon is no longer constrained to applications but rather more vague concepts such as content and speed.
On the content side, artificial intelligence (AI) is the driving force. Note that there is real category confusion about AI that is to be expected. Legacy labels such as neural networks and machine learning are becoming meaningless because each overlap and can rightly be called AI, which depicts a consolidation of applications in real-time. Now couple that with what AI needs to allow for greater capabilities, ones that science fiction describes, and there we have it. Speed. And this increased speed, actually 20to 50 times faster than its predecessor, is coming through 5g wireless.
Long story short, if you want to see the future of tech innovation, keep your eyes on AI and 5G. Throw in the peripheral technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the picture becomes clear.
Diane Israel is a Chicago native and long-time supporter and advocate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She is also famous for her culinary recipes. Diane can be reached at Diane@IsraelOnIsrael.com