CEO and founder of R2ai, Yiwen Huang, talks to Interesting Engineering in an exclusive interview about how he started a company where AI creates Machine Learning models and how AI is not going to replace but enhance humans’ jobs in the future.
R2ai’s Founder and CEO, Yiwen Huang, tells interesting Engineering in an interview how he goes from a lab to creating an AI that creates AI. And how AI is not going to replace but to augment jobs in the future.
This thesis has been rolling around like a marble in the bowl of a lot of people’s brains for a while now, and many of those marbles were handed out by Martin Ford, in his 2015 book, “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” In the book, and in an essay in “Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work” (Cornell), Ford acknowledges that all other earlier robot-invasion panics were unfounded. In the nineteenth century, people who worked on farms lost their jobs when agricultural processes were mechanized, but they eventually earned more money working in factories. In the twentieth century, automation of industrial production led to warnings about “unprecedented economic and social disorder.” Instead, displaced factory workers moved into service jobs. Machines eliminate jobs; rising productivity creates new jobs.
Probably, but don’t count yourself out.
We already had a robot that could make fast food burgers. And now we have an artificial intelligence that can take your order for one. Earlier this month, Colorado-based startup Valyant AI announced the launch of a voice-based AI customer service platform, which is now taking customer orders at the drive-thru at Denver’s Good Times Burgers and Frozen Custard.
The AI is reportedly not taking jobs from humans, either.
To make its developers’ jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.
Engineers began using Sapienz to review the Facebook app in September 2017, and have gradually begun using it for the rest of the company’s apps (which include Messenger, Instagram, Facebook Lite, and Workplace). In May, the team will describe its more recent adoption of SapFix at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Montreal, Canada (and they’re hiring).
In the future, industrial robots may create jobs, boost productivity and spur higher wages. But one thing seems more certain for now: They’re vulnerable to hackers.
Factories, hospitals and other big robot users often lack sufficient levels of defense against a digital attack, according to cybersecurity experts, robot manufacturers and engineering researchers. The risk levels are rising as more robots morph from being offline and isolated to being internet-connected machines, often working alongside humans.
5G promises to make factories a lot smarter. And that means they’ll be a lot more vulnerable.
Ladies Monday with Cindy Rampersaud.
How do we prepare young people for jobs that do not yet exist?
Global changes in technology, population and urbanisation are impacting the educational landscape. The role of skill-based education is now critical for many economies. Getting it right is essential for the economic and social aspirations of individuals, communities, employers, economies.
Technological discovery is a key enabler that can provide successful careers through increased access to education for millions – solutions and application of learning that leads to innovation and growth. Cindy is SVP at Pearson Education. She is responsible for the development of Pearson’s UK technical and vocational qualifications. Cindy sits on the Commission for learning for life, work and a changing economy and is on the Board of The Children’s Society and Speakers Trust.
Blockchain shows major potential to drive positive change across a wide range of industries. Like any disruptive technology, there are ethical considerations that must be identified, discussed, and mitigated as we adopt and apply this technology, so that we can maximize the positive benefits, and minimize the negative side effects.
Own Your Data
For decades we have sought the ability for data subjects to own and control their data. Sadly, with massive proliferation of centralized database silos and the sensitive personal information they contain, we have fallen far short of data subjects having access to, let alone owning or controlling their data. Blockchain has the potential to enable data subjects to access their data, review and amend it, see reports of who else has accessed it, give consent or opt-in / opt-out of data sharing, and even request they be forgotten and their information be deleted.
Monetize Your Data
Blockchain enables cryptocurrency. Think of blockchain as a platform, and a cryptocurrency as a particular application that can run on blockchain, along with many other applications such as those that can enable data subjects to control their data. Users can be rewarded with cryptocurrencies for opting into, or giving consent to collaborate and share their data. For example, a patient may opt into participation in a clinical trial, and in so doing make their data available for research within that clinical trial. This capability has the potential to provide a direct value feedback loop whereby data subjects can monetize their data. This is a huge leap forward from today where data subjects give up their data free, in many cases unaware, and organizations collecting it make highly profitable businesses out of monetizing data with nary a cent going back to the data subject. However, in enabling data subjects to own, control, and monetize their data guardrails must be put in place around this to ensure that data subjects are fully informed of not just monetization opportunities, but also how their data will be used, any risks, and their rights.
Disintermediation and Disruption
Historically collaboration across a group of organizations has required a central trusted intermediary in a “hub and spoke” architecture where the intermediary is at the center and mediates all interactions across the network. One can see examples of this across many industries. In financial services we have banks and banking networks. In healthcare we have clearinghouses and health information exchanges. In most industries we have supply chains where distributors are the hub connecting manufacturers and suppliers with dispensaries and retailers. Unfortunately, many intermediaries have abused their role and introduced excessive costs, delays, and single points of failure where if they are unavailable collaboration across the whole network is halted. To be clear, where physical goods flow, such as in supply chains, centralized hub and spoke architectures will endure. However, when it comes to the flow of digital goods, including any information, cryptocurrencies, crypto-tokens, or otherwise, blockchain has the potential to enable decentralized collaboration across a consortium of organizations in near real-time, and without the added cost, and delay of the intermediary. Since blockchain is decentralized, it eliminates the central single point of failure that makes hub and spoke architectures vulnerable to attacks on the availability of data or systems such as ransomware or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). However, with this disintermediation and disruption the common assertion is that many will lose their jobs. Actually, with blockchain there is a different role for an intermediary around training, system integration, support, governance, consensus building across the consortium, and so forth, so there is an opportunity for intermediaries of today to evolve, adapt to blockchain, and even leverage blockchain to their benefit.
Hyper-Efficiency and Job Loss
Today many common types data are maintained redundantly across silos. Think of the last time you changed your phone number or address and had to visit hundreds of websites to update it. Did you visit them all? Probably not (who has time), and so many of the copies of your data are old, inaccurate, etc. This system results in massive collective cost and causes major inefficiencies. Rather than maintain common data in one place,
and update it once as needed, and share it near real-time across the consortium of organizations that need it, the cost to maintain common data is multiplied by the number of organizations that have copies and maintain it independently. Further, inconsistencies in this data cause friction and additional cost in the system, and frustration. If your address is not updated mail goes to the wrong place, needs to be forwarded, or maybe you didn’t do forwarding and so you lose it and absorb whatever the impact. In healthcare if records are inconsistent across payers and providers, medical claims can bounce causing delays in payment and so forth. So blockchain having the potential to help solve this sounds good, right? Well, what about the millions of people whose job it is today to maintain redundant copies of information across these organizations and silos. In using blockchain to pave the way for secure, and hyper-efficient maintenance of common, shared data, we may inadvertently disrupt the jobs of millions of people doing mundane, redundant data maintenance today. This is not to say we should not move forward with blockchain and realize its benefits, but we should do so fully aware of the impacts and help those impacted proactively adjust, retrain and move onto more useful, interesting, and higher paying roles.
Environmental Impacts
Public blockchains such as bitcoin span untrusted networks, with untrusted participants, and so must use conservative consensus algorithms such as PoW (Proof of Work) which require mining. To be competitive in mining one must invest in massive amounts of hardware that use massive amounts of electric power. This is a considerable environmental and ethical concern. For public blockchains to be feasible going forward we must find new ways of enabling blockchain consensus in ways that do not require massive amounts of hardware or electric power. Key clarification: this challenge is associated with mining and public blockchains and the consensus algorithms they use, whereas private / consortium blockchains, which represent the vast majority of blockchains used in industries such as healthcare, don’t typically have mining, but rather validation of transactions and blocks which does not require any significant additional hardware or electricity. Therefore, while this is a challenge for public blockchain applications such as bitcoin, it is not an issue for private / consortium blockchains.
Anonymity, Cryptocurrencies, and Crime
Ransomware is enabled by anonymous payment methods such as bitcoin. An attacker can infect your system, encrypt your data, and demand payment in bitcoin, and you can pay them with nary an idea of who attacked you, nor the ability for you or law enforcement to identify them. While cryptocurrencies and crypto-tokens have incredible potential for good, they are in this respect a double edged sword since they also pave the way not only for ransomware attacks, but DDoS, any many other types of crime. On the other hand, blockchain has incredible potential to help mitigate many types of fraud related crime so blockchain and crime is a multi-faceted ethical consideration. For more on this see Blockchain as a tool for anti-fraud.
What other ethical considerations are you seeing with blockchain? I post regularly on blockchain, cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, AI, cloud, and healthcare on LinkedIn and Twitter, and welcome collaboration on these fast evolving fields. Reach out and connect to collaborate.
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By giving $1,000 per month to a family.
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang, a 43-year-old entrepreneur-turned-politician, is focusing his campaign on helping Americans who are losing jobs to automation.
Yang wants all Americans to benefit from a universal basic income, which would provide regular cash payments to people regardless of their employment status. Although he is a long-shot candidate, the Democrat said he believes so strongly in the need for a basic income that he is dedicated to running.
FRIB) will be a scientific user facility for the Office of Nuclear Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC). FRIB is funded by the DOE-SC, MSU and the State of Michigan. Supporting the mission of the Office of Nuclear Physics in DOE-SC, FRIB will enable scientists to make discoveries about the properties of rare isotopes (that is, short-lived nuclei not normally found on Earth), nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and applications for society, including in medicine, homeland security, and industry.
This video — The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU — explains the history of FRIB, its role in research and education, and its future in rare-isotope discoveries. It includes an animated sequence to help viewers understand what FRIB is about.
Employment opportunities: FRIB is looking for engineers, physicists, and other talented professionals to build the world’s leading rare isotope facility.
In the past few years, artificial intelligence has advanced so quickly that it now seems hardly a month goes by without a newsworthy AI breakthrough. In areas as wide-ranging as speech translation, medical diagnosis, and gameplay, we have seen computers outperform humans in startling ways.
This has sparked a discussion about how AI will impact employment. Some fear that as AI improves, it will supplant workers, creating an ever-growing pool of unemployable humans who cannot compete economically with machines.
This concern, while understandable, is unfounded. In fact, AI will be the greatest job engine the world has ever seen.
