She Loves Me. She Loves Me Bot!
Barrie Sheers, GM Microsoft New Zealand
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: any technology that’s in the world when you are born is natural, anything invented in your twenties is thrilling, but everything invented when you’re over thirty-five is against the natural order of things!
I’m well past thirty-five and I only need to watch my mum struggle with Skype to know what Adams was getting at. And it is no exaggeration to state that of all the technological leaps and shunts over the past decade, AI is the most disruptive. It is however also the most incredible. No matter what age you are, for millions of people it will eventually become the ‘natural order of things.’
Let’s sweep the clichés – Terminator! Skynet! – out of the way, so we can talk sensibly about AI. The first point is: AI is not coming. It’s here. Billions of people already talk to bots. The Turing Test is broken millions of times every single day. Again – sorry mum! – I have seen my mother using a bot to buy car insurance, without having the faintest clue that she is actually talking to a bot, not a person.
Just look at the launch of Xiaoice in China. This intelligent, natural-language bot is programmed to behave like an 18-year-old girl who is emphatic, humorous, even sarcastic. You think Justin Bieber is popular? Well, Xiaoice has conversed with more than 100 million users, and it has been estimated that 25% of users have already declared their love to her.
From the sublime to the amazing. Recently a Japanese bot, Shibuyu Mirai has even been granted residency status! So AI is not a future-gazing concept, it’s here and over time it will be as natural a part of our lives as the weather.
Beyond these big examples, we have smaller AI working behind lots of our technology, which you may not even be aware of. From the simple PowerPoint Design AI, which makes your hastily thrown-together slides look beautiful (I use it all the time), to the sophisticated PowerPoint Translator Hub which translates your voice into just about any other language. It’s AI, it’s phenomenal, it’s free with Office 365 (sorry: little plug there!), and it’s used every day.
The question of disruption is important to tackle. AI will have a disruptive effect on society. It already has. The path of true transformation never ran smoothly. But it is a path that will lead us to incredible moments as a society. We believe AI, data analytics and advanced robotics constitute a Fourth Industrial Revolution. AI will deliver huge benefits, reconfiguring systems in every sector, from autonomous vehicles to personalised learning to precision medicine. It will revolutionise research, delivering new insights into the physical and social sciences, helping us build healthier, cleaner, richer communities.
For example, Microsoft’s recent AI for Earth strives to solve some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including the health of our planet. One of these projects is Farmbeat, which attempts to address soaring food demands while dealing with the limited amount of arable land – something of great relevance to New Zealand.
This initiative leverages the power of the cloud and machine learning to enable data-driven farming. In other words, help farmers not just harvest their crops, but harvest the data on their farms to reap the most out of what they sow.
A recent agritech report published by Massey University and Microsoft showed that although many New Zealand farmers are making great technological innovations, overall the entire industry is still not entirely prepared for the future.
One exception to this rule is the likes of Blackhills Farms, which implemented a comprehensive Internet of Things on the Farm system with Schneider Waterforce to use data more efficiently than ever before. The new system helped Blackhills realise 30 percent savings in water utilisation and a 50 percent reduction in energy costs.
AI can also be used to create a more inclusive future by empowering people. Seeing AI is a free app designed by Microsoft to make the visual world around us more accessible for the 285 million people in the world with low vision. This app is able recognise a wide spectrum of visual cues – from emotions to barcodes to handwriting – and translate them into audible descriptions. This app is making the world easier and richer for those with low vision.
New technology is always disruptive, and naturally, many are wary of it. You can’t expect the whole world to fall in love with it in the way many have fallen in love with Xiaoice. However, it is worth a try. In fact, you may, without even recognising it, already have tried it.