Thoughts about The Future - extended research and essay writing

We have recently done a long project that began with some lectures about the future, and what developments might be coming along as benefits and challenges for the generation now in their teens.


We did a lot of research, using a wide range of sources on the internet to try to get an idea of what the big issues are. Group members then wrote essays on their findings.

SH wrote about the coming of Artificial Intelligence. I looked at the societal changes that may result from social media, automation  and the collapse of the job market for many types of worker. In later parts of his essay, SH borrows from discovered text, showing the breadth of his reading.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE FUTURE: SH

The ‘well-known’ Artificial Intelligent, so called AI is a general name for those machines or robots that has its own mind that’s been set up by us, which makes them different, or smarter, than other normal machines that can only follows certain orders that human makes. Now because of the technology is developing in a rapid speed, especially in those categories that requires a relatively high level of new developments, and AI is the one that’s developing the fastest in all of them, also where people are focusing the most at.

The development also brings us a big distribution about whether this is positive future to look at or not. Far before the AI industry has anything that is actually working, a lot people had already started the idea of it can be a big problem for us, because they thinks that machines should never have their own thoughts like we do, but they can only follows what we told them to do, or they might turn their back on us when they think they are smart enough to do that. This can even lead to the total destruction of human beings or the shift of power on the scale of the entire planet. This thoughts has spread with a tremendous speed through the Medias, internets, a lot of them even comes from entertainments such as movies and games, or novels about our dark future of becoming the slaves of robots.

The scientists obviously has a different thoughts than average people like us. They mostly thinks that AI is going to bring us into a much brighter future which they can help us do all the rough works, so we can just be lazy watching TV while our intelligent robot does everything for us, and we can all be fat and anti-social.  

Many factors could significantly accelerate or decelerate the development for AI, and honestly we haven’t discover most of them yet. These include – but are explicitly not limited to: Increasing difficulty of new breakthroughs. Progress in science depends not just on funding available and the effort put in, but also on how ‘hard’ progress is; some fields see the difficulty of further discovery increase with each successive discovery. AI may prove to be one such field, where recent advances are essentially ‘low-hanging fruit’. Indeed, this ‘intractability’ is sometimes considered to apply to some key subfields of AI already, such as natural language processing or long-term automated planning. There may also be a natural or operational ‘ceiling’ to the intelligence available to neural architectures (even non-biological ones), resulting in diminishing returns of research and an eventual, ‘slowdown’ of our progress towards human-level intelligence. Eventual hardware limitations. On a related note, it is possible that along with conceptual and software limits, we may also reach fundamental physical limits to our hardware: while previous predictions to this effect have not been borne out, it is possible that before long we will reach an end to Moore’s Law, and this will slow progress towards AI. For instance, in 2004, the “serial speed” version of Moore’s Law broke down, and the overall trend in computing power growth was only preserved by making a transition to parallel processors. While this for the moment preserved Moore’s Law, it raised new difficulties for software developers. Overall, the formulation of Moore’s law which has the most economic relevance, computations per dollar, continues to hold, but it is unclear how much longer this will continue before hard physical limits assert themselves, in a way that cannot cost-effectively be addressed through other innovations. A breakthrough in cognitive neuroscience. Conversely, while it is currently difficult to map and understand the cognitive algorithms behind human intelligence, new tools, methods or even concepts might enable cognitive neuroscientists to achieve a quantum leap in understanding how the human brain gives rise to its own intelligence, in a way which might allow AI scientists to recreate that mechanism in an artificial substrate. Human enhancement. More speculatively, human cognitive enhancement technologies could make researchers (and with them whole academic networks) more effective via cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals, brain-computer interfaces (the so-called ‘neural lace’), or genetic engineering for cognitive traits, speeding up the rate of AGI research, and the exchange of lessons and breakthroughs, at least within communities and companies. Quantum computing. Having overcome early hurdles and barriers, the next developments in quantum computing nonetheless remain difficult to predict; it is also unclear whether or not breakthroughs in this field could contribute (or conversely, might be necessary) to creating and running advanced AI. However, at present it appears that even if built, a quantum computer might provide dramatic computing speed improvements – but only for specific applications. A ‘Sputnik event’ creating large development incentives. The 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik demonstrated to the world the possibility of space flight – and to the US the possibility of an accurate Soviet nuclear ballistic missile arsenal. The resulting aspirations to explore and claim space, and the fears over a ‘missile gap’, together sparked a space race between the superpowers, with unprecedented and long-term funding for space projects on both sides. If there is a similar “Sputnik moment” for AI, which demonstrates in a vivid or compelling way that human-level (or smarter-than-human) AI is possible or even imminent, this can drive a sharp race towards the finish line, especially since the winner of this race could reap tremendous economic, scientific, military and geopolitical rewards. Societal collapse – or existential catastrophe. Political, economic, technological, or natural disasters may cause a societal collapse during which progress in AI would be essentially stalled or even reversed. There is a growing body of scientific literature that argues that the risk of extreme, global catastrophes deserve increasing attentions from both researchers and policymakers. This literature distinguishes between 54 Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Defence

‘Limited’ Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs)—loosely defined as “risks that might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” —and absolute ‘Existential Risks’ threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life”. Such threats, which can include natural risks such as meteorite strikes, volcanic winter, or pandemics as much as anthropogenic catastrophes such as the threat of (inadvertent) nuclear winter or (with advances in synthetic biology) engineered pandemics. These are extreme tail events which, by their nature, would be hard to predict or prepare for.

Societal distrust and disinclination. Less severely, but still problematic, is the potential for societal disruptions, even if falling short of ‘global catastrophic risks’, to inhibit technological development. Indeed, some have suggested that ultimately the greatest barrier to the development of AI could be society. As AI systems become ever more powerful, as they automate away more and more human jobs, create pervasive inequality, or if such systems end up used for comprehensive and intrusive government surveillance, some societies may question whether it is wise to create machines more powerful than themselves. Already today, there is a growing international movement against lethal autonomous weapons systems, under the banner of the ‘Campaign to Stop Killer Robots’. While the track record of societies willingly relinquishing strategically powerful technologies is hardly promising in this, or perhaps chequered at best, the potential disruption caused by advanced AI systems in economies or in war could be visceral enough for enough people that it strengthens the public case of possible ‘AI abolitionists’.

  This last point of societal distrust is relevant as it relates to broader caveats we should bear in mind in the development and deployment of machine intelligence. If the development of AI, and its introduction into society, is rushed or mishandled, public concerns over technological unemployment, machine bias, automated surveillance or computational propaganda can and will create critical legitimacy problems, driving public distrust of, and even societal backlash against AI. Therefore, even if we may still be some time from developing ‘full’ or ‘general’ AI, it is important that we now already think about the legal and ethical implications, and consider measures for the responsible supervision, regulation, and governance of the design and deployment of AI systems – all the while keeping in mind that this is not a zero-sum game, and AI can, on balance and if handled properly, be a beneficial technology with innumerable positive applications. Thus we might meet the call, by prominent AI researchers, to also commit to the “careful monitoring and deliberation about the implications of AI advances for defence and warfare, including potentially destabilizing developments and deployments.” In doing so, policymakers can take stock of the influential long-and short term research priorities set out by AI experts in the 2015 open letter on “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence”; or the principles of guiding ethical research and design, ensuring integrity of personal data and individual access and control, as well as economic and humanitarian issues, as recently set out by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in their study on ‘Ethically Aligned Design: a Vision for Prioritizing Human Well Being with Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems.’ Perhaps most importantly, we must keep in mind the ‘AI Principles’ agreed to by AI experts at the recent landmark ‘Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI.

For conclusion: I personally think that the AI industry is a really deep and dangerous industry to be focusing at, again it can lead to some consequences that we could never fix. Still it has a lot to develop even despite from the fact it’s developing really fast, there are both advantages and disadvantages about what might happen next, I guess we will just have to wait and see, hoping that humanity knows what they are doing.

AC wrote about the pressures on world ecosystems, and what is already being described as the sixth great mass-extinction of life on Earth.

Introduction

  Here is a question. Is the Earth is suitable for us to live on? My answer would be yes and no. We are such an intelligent creature on Earth, you may understand that the world seems to be alright to you or us. In fact, things change themselves slowly. Too slow that we can’t even feel the change in the start. Then here comes out a new question. What is happening? Yes, one of the most powerful words ‘what’ has guided us to think what is going on around us. What on Earth is changing?

  This passage is going to talk about what disasters have happened and what could happen in the future. What is the cause and what made us end up facing these problems.

1. The great extinct ( the 6 )

      The Sixth Great Mass Extinction (Ron Wagler)

https://www.huntercourse.com/blog/2011/08/10-animals-hunted-or-nearly-hunted-to-extinction/ [1]

https://greentumble.com/how-does-deforestation-affect-animals/ [2]

   

The Great Extinction -Hot/cool wave

 

  We all know what the word extinct means, but what does The great extinct or Extinction event mean? It is a time period that animals or creatures suddenly died in large number. For example, the First extinction event ‘Ordovician-Silurian extinction event’. Approximately 25% of the families and nearly 60% of the genera of marine organisms were lost because of fluctuations in sea level, extensive glaciations and global warming [1] . The world ‘global warming’ is one of the reasons why we are taking this seriously, It has been related to a lot of problems that might deeply effective to our survival.

  Every year, thousands of old people die in summer because of heatwave. We might think it is because the condition problems, but have a think about it. Have you ever felt that  every year is getting hotter than the year before? This is because the greenhouse gases have been created more and more by human activity. Greenhouse gases originally control the heat energy not letting some of it get out from the Earth’s atmosphere. We use to have a suitable amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere until the time that our technology started to change. By the time that human invented tool such as plane, car, boat etc. We have been using fossil fuel as the fuel for those tool. Firstly it seem to be alright, but in reason years. We started to know that how greenhouse gases affect the atmosphere. More and more gases trap the heat energy in the atmosphere and creating hot wave to a lot of place like U.S, China, Philippines other countries etc. Every year creature continuously suffering the heat and die because of the enormous changing of the climate. A research from WWF shows that the sea levels rising, ocean temperature getting warmer and longer & more intense droughts threaten crops, wildlife and freshwater supplies. For example, climate change has some impact with sea turtle that sand temperature might too hot for the turtle eggs and sea levels might rise too high and damage the turtle nest. Even more , turtle might lose their birthing habitat.

The Great Extinction- environment

   As we have mentioned, problems from fossil fuel not only causing the heat wave but also create acid rain, change the ocean temperature and acidity. This may cause some serious problems that some of the fish species may go to other ocean area. It might unbalance the food chain on the local fish species and cause extinction of ocean creature. On the other hand, carbon dioxide which is one of our well known greenhouse gases may combine with rain drops. It would create acid rain, damage building, forest and river etc. 

Even our or animal hair cells could be damage. Firstly, those animals that rely on trees would lose their shelter and reproductive places. Insect and aquatic life-form would be killed. On us, we would lose our resource from frost, farm and ocean.  Building that we had made would be corroded by the rain. Soon we are no longer to live on the surface of the Earth with no food and water supply for every creature.

The great extinction - Extinction of creature / forest

  Recently, scientists have made a theory that every day, UN Environment Programme said that in 2018. There were 150 - 200 species of creatures would become extinct in one day. This result has proved that human being might have made a huge problems with decreasing the number of creature by every kind of purpose. Hunting is one of the most usual things that cause the problems. For example, dodo birds. They have been hunted to extinct because of  the taste of it. In the mid-to-late 17th century, when people arrived on the island of mauritius. They brought their hunting pet into the island and started their killing spree.finally, this action cause the dodo extinct. For another example, by the deforestation continue in all over the world. Forests cover 31 percent of Earth’s land surface and house a majority of plant and animals found on earth. It is estimated that these diverse ecosystems house 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. Rainforests have especially high special density, covering 2 percent of the earth’s surface, but housing nearly 50 percent of all plant and animal species. But forests are often cut or burned to make for farming or cattle grazing. Commercial logging also contributes to deforestation, and forest are cut down for development. Deforestation in developing nations is primarily due to a competitive global economy, where poorer countries sell their natural resources to pay their debts to wealthy countries. The poor in these countries also utilize the land for farming and sustenance, and these pressures continue to increase as population levels increase. Here is a thing call ‘clear-cutting’. It can be particularly devastating to forest ecosystems, especially in rainforest ecosystems. Rainforest deforestation negatively affects the whole ecosystem because the clear-cut land is much more vulnerable to soil erosion when no trees remain to hold the soil in place.  

The great extinction - Extinction of creature / forest

  [2]The most affected regions are the Amazon Rainforest, Sumatran Jungles, and forests of British Columbia. These forests have been specifically target for deforestation for a few reasons, but overall for human gain. The amazon rainforest is being clean cut at a rate of 20,000 square miles per year and mostly to create more land for farming and pastures for cattle ranching. Sumatran rainforests are being destroyed and replaced by massive palm plantations to help feed human obsession with palm oil. Canada’s British Columbia is a hotspot for old growth forests that contain some of the most sought-after lumber the world.

These examples are just a few of the most publicized areas dealing with the problem of deforestation and there are many less well known regions being just as dramatically affected. On the other hand, come back to the impact to animal.    

  Deforestation has real consequences for animals. The most serious impacts of deforestation on animals are habitat loss, changing climate, higher risk of wildfires and droughts, starvation, increased interaction with human. Deforestation can lead to a direct loss of wildlife habitat as well as a general degradation of their habitat. The removal of trees and other types of vegetation reduces available food, shelter, and breeding habitat. Wildlife habitats become fragmented, where native species must live on remaining habitat islands that are surrounded by disturbed land that is being used for agriculture and other uses.     

  Habitat fragments may be too small to maintain viable populations of animals, and an animal living in one population may no longer be able to freely breed with individuals in other populations. Animals may not be able to find adequate shelter, water, and food to survive within remaining habitat. Animals may also encounter dangerous situations such as increased human-wildlife conflicts and being hit by vehicles when they attempt to migrate between habitat fragments. With increased habitat edge, wildlife may experience an increased vulnerability to predation, poaching, wind, sunlight, invasion of exotic plant and animal species into remaining forest habitat, and other factors such as direct exposure to natural disasters that were not as much of a threat prior to the deforestation event. Some animal species are entirely dependent upon old growth forest habitat, such as the Northern Spotted Owl in the Western United States, and cannot survive in secondary forest habitat. This means that in places where is any deforestation happening, these species cannot thrive and will gradually disappear.

For climate changing, Because forests store a large amount of the world’s carbon dioxide, deforestation contributes 15 percent of global greenhouse emissions. When forest trees are burned, the carbon that they were storing gets released into the atmosphere. Climate change leads to new weather patterns, changing levels of precipitation and temperature fluctuations . These climatic changes can have many negative impacts, not only on local populations, but also on wildlife populations around the world as global climate change alters the habitat they depend on.  Have a think, we have been to their home to cut tree. It could increased interaction with both of us and animals. Generally, wildlife interaction with us is negative and can have disastrous consequences for the animals. One of the best examples of our problematic co-existence with large carnivores are wolves. Wolves, once the most widely distributed mammals in the world, were for centuries regarded as our worst enemy for hunting our livestock.

The great extinction - Extinction of creature / forest

  The conflict get so far that wolves were extensively hunted down and became a rare sight in many areas of the world. Finally, we need to know that Deforestation has dramatic effects for all animals, whether they live in rivers, oceans, forests, mountains, or skies.

The most affected group of animals are those that are endemic to a specific area or ecosystem, which is directly or closely linked with the forest. This represents animals that are adapted only to their specific habitat. They are often found in remote and isolated areas, like on islands or deep in the rainforest. Very specialized animals fill a single niche found in an ecosystem. Sometimes the niche is so specialized that it is only found in a small region, like a single lake or one square kilometre of forest.

The Great Extinction-Conclusion 

Through this research or thing. I think we need to have a think what we have done. As I wrote a few pages before. I have said that the extinction, would cause a lot of life form to die. Nowadays, what is changing like deforestation or something. It seem to be showing that the coming up new extinction is coming. Although it would take longer time to finish than other extinction. Still, if you have a look, you might know that the extinction is already started and it is lead us to end. All of the problems it seems to been started on us. We change everything by our activity and it seems that we are too late to fix these problems.

       ~End~

HN wrote about the impact of Robots on her home society in Japan.

     My future project

My aim of this project

 Nowadays, a lot of kinds of scientific technologies are advanced, and our lifestyle has been changed. Although we can get many things which make us comfortable and our lives more convenient, we have some disadvantages such as getting worse eye sight, problems between friends caused by social media and the disruption of our circadian rhythm by a smart phone or computer. Additionally, we have become very international in the world. We need some new skills, for example, speaking foreign language especially English. From these things, I am interested in how our life will be changed. Hence, my aim of this project is to know about our jobs in the future and now they will be different from currently.

The future of our jobs

 Do you know lots of kinds of scientific technologies such as robots, and AI (artificial intelligence) have become dramatically common in the last few years? With virtual reality and digital personal assistants the picture is even more complicated. It is said that there are three types of dislocations that may occur to most of any jobs in the world. They are digitalization, automation and robotization.

Digitization – Digital transformation will be used in all fields of industry in the near future. “Digital” means turning things that humans used to do physically into virtual versions. Amazon is an effective example that indicates the digital revolution. We don’t need to go to a store. Everything is done at via browser, and delivered to our home. Uber and Gett are more recent examples of digitalization. All we need to do is just press a button, and then a car comes to our location and the ride is already paid for via the application.

Automation – the process allows humans try to do tasks as simply as possible through the use of technologies in order to improve and increase efficiently. A few examples of automation from thousands years ago are the plough, the wheel, the yoke, harness and the spindles. Nowadays, automation is used in a factory to activate, execute, monitor and control processes, products, or services, and the delivery. The next things to be automated will be cars and drones.

Robotization – this is the latest technology development from recent advances; cloud computing, artificial intelligence, engineering, and data analysis. Robots can be said to be “simple” automation because they help us to arrange information and manufacture. There are some kinds of robots in multiple areas. For instance, humanoid robots; some of them offer an assistance to care for older people as a caregiver robots. Others are robots for military use. A third kind is software-only robots called “chatbot.”

These three revolutions will lead to improvements in our lives. They will have a big effect on our advanced societies, emerging markets and less developed countries.

On the other hand, plenty of jobs will disappear a few decades later. Since I’m very interested in what kinds of jobs will be lost by digitalization, automation and robotization, I am showing you with some questions.

There are nine questions divided into three groups;

First group is

1, Did your job/profession exist before World War 2?

2, Are these many others like you that do the exact same job, in your organization or in others?

3, Do you have an association or unions for your job/profession?

If you answered “yes” to all three questions, then your job will disappear in the near future and it will be digitized or robotized.

If you answered “no” to one or more questions , you go another questions of next group.

1, Does your job require a higher-education degree?

2, Do you need to employ creativity in your job?

3, Does your work require the interaction and collaboration with others inside your organisation?

If your answer was “no” to all three questions, then your job will be automated or chatbotized.

If your answer was “yes” to one or more questions, you go questions of the last group.

1, Does your job require you to have a routine or work according to a specific method, template, or standard?

2, Will your job be affect if another job you work with is automated, robotized or digitalized?

3, Does your job act as an intermediary between other job in a process or activity?

If you answered “yes” to all three questions, then your job will be automated or digitalized.

If you are still answering “no” to any of three questions, the job you want to do in the future or your skills to engage your job are required. But, I cannot guarantee that you will able to get your work obviously.

(These are from an article of Tomer Simon, PhD. It was written 16^th June in 2017)

Therefore we need to re-think of the state of our future society, and economy and politics change. We have the right to live a happy life, so we have to save the things that make life good. The reconsidering of jobs, and the connections between government and citizens will be very important. We have an opportunity to create a new system for living and to development a new sort of politics to deal with the economic disruption that is coming. If almost of our jobs in are digitized, automated or robotized, politicians will be concerned about how to prevent a circumstance which society is under the control of robots or intelligences and it might be complicated. However, there are some suggestions to help people to solve the transition from an industrial socialise to a digitalised society and economy. The strategy for employees in the future will be include activities of volunteering and to spend their own leisure time usefully. The meaning of “jobs” will have a wide range. The definition is no longer people’s sense of personal meaning, but also multiple activities. All we are required to do for the future is getting skills which robots or intelligences can’t be substituted into, such as traditional craftsmanship, obtaining a high communication skills which make people feel better or solve their mental problems, and developing their capabilities.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

There are several things which speed up the introduction of the scientific knowledge, human health, economic growth and more. They are the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But it has possibility that the revolution could cause that robots and computers can perform many human jobs as a source of significant personal concern.

The four industrial revolution is what leads society changing completely by technologies.

The first industrial revolution was powered by a major invention such as steam engine. It enabled us to produce in a different route more effectively. We became able to manufacture in a factory.

The second industrial revolution was mass production with steel, oil, and electricity. The key inventions were a light bulb, a telephone and an internet combustion engine.

The third industrial revolution was the invention of the semiconductor, personal computer and the internet marked. Those inventions are also called “Digital Revolution”

The four industrial revolution occurred a long pause after the third one. It was fairy different to the previous three one. One of the reasons is it has a gap among the digital, physical and biological world. The other one is the technology is changing extremely quicker than ever. The evidence to prove that how fast the technologies are advanced is “Pokemon Go.” The 100 million users had access to it in less than one month by contrast the case of the telephone which spent 75 years to get an exactly same amount of people. It was spreading at an incredible rate. Augment reality, 3D printing and artificial intelligence for the operation are major technologies that enormously affected us, especially companies.

Nowadays trying to think separately of “tech” and “non-tech” has lost necessarily. However, there are some people who have not noticed it. In fact, many companies, the government and citizens cannot keep up to this such a fast speed of change of circumstances.

From a president of an association, “technology” is defined that “the betterment of humankind.” It is said that all technology produce more jobs than it destroy, bring valuable benefits to us, give us the higher level of lives and produce an effective productivity and economic growth. Yet, there is a lot of fear about, not only for individual livelihoods, but also for the stability of society as change happens dramatically in many areas. We cannot avoid this outcome. If we want to have advantages from latest technology, we have to stand up with actions right now. We must expect what will be happened in the future.

Technology, automation and AI will bring benefits as well as threats to our way of life.

The advantages to us is being supplied a top quality and industry-relevant skills. Innovative online programmes are for example. We will get them at a chain management, many universities, and MIT. They give us a traditional higher education in low price. Additionally, “continuous uptraining” is an important factor according to industry experts with sophisticated experiences of digital and problem-solving skills. Teachers who are considering how to support the future of their pupils agree. The system which allow all employees to spend significant time in some span produces fresh skills and become an essential tool to help individuals to adapt a big change. Finally the most surprising effect is we could be able to get higher salary in a shorter working time, because automation and robots can deal with tasks quickly and can increase proactivity.

On the other hand, we have some disadvantages from the automation. The largest problem for us is that plenty of jobs will disappear.

The graph above indicates which kind of jobs are becoming automatable. The category of jobs with which interact people and need the high education and much knowledge will still be required. By contrast, most service industries will be automated.  Checkout assistants, leisure and there park attendants etc.

In fact, 25.3% of jobs is already disappearing between 2011 and 2017 in England. Especially women have got a big threat because most of them are doing part-time working. Almost all jobs in this field such as checkout assistants, receptionists and doing paper works have been automated. They have 70.2% of high possibility disappearing. Indeed, a few years ago, Amazon opened a supermarket in Seattle with all automation. No staffs, just “walk out” technology to bill customers and queues.

From those factors, hundreds of employees will lose their jobs. Robots have much better skills. Accuracy, effectively and sophisticated are for instance. Unfortunately, we can’t get those skills as well as them and also can’t have trainings to absorb those skills.

In addition, we have “winner-take-all economy.” If it happens, a differentia between rich and poor will be broadened. Workers who have high skills can work with a good salary, on the other hand, others are struggled with the way to be succeed and will be one of the most important and the most difficult problems to solve. It will be remained as an issue.

To change the future to a good direction totally, we need a great effort as the society, as the same field of an industry. Finding long-term of solutions is the goal.

What automation will transform our jobs, our lives and our society is obvious. However, all of jobs are not a target and whether it gives us benefits or bad effects is up to us. A super prioritise for everyone is to enjoy the cheerful and healthy stable lives. Since everybody has right to live in society, it is important to get an opportunity and challenge to use our time effectively. If we know latest advancing technologies well, it might help you to certain our future is not going to the end and we have way to prevent from damaging. Actually we have become engaged in defining the current problems and forecasting challenges very closely, as well as looking for the country which can develop or solve problems collaboratively. For instance when a disaster or a military problem happens. It promotes to build a future in which technologies work for everyone.

Human beings VS AI

In this topic, I will introduce some robots which do exactly same things that people are doing.

Firstly, let’s meet a Japanese robot called “Tourobo Kun.” Recently it took the entrance exam to get into Tokyo University. This is the top and hardest to get into university in Japan. “Tourobo Kun” took the paper four times, but it could not get a score high enough to gain a place at the university. It could get only limited score in the exam. It needed good reading comprehension in Japanese and English, but did not have it. By contrast it always got high scores in maths or science exams.

The second one is “alpha Go.” This robot won in “Go” competitions against humans even though people believed that robots would never win against people in this game. “Go” is very similar to chess. It needs the ability to plan what to do next to win, but there are many more moves that could happen next. In addition, it is also required an ability to take a broad view.  Therefore when it won, a lot of people got a shock. This robot has been developed and getting even more intelligence now.

The third one is a translation robot.  There was a big competition in 2017 to decide which is more sophisticated at translation, humans or robots. Four people whose occupations were translator and three new AI robots were played against each other. The result was an overwhelming victory for people. Robots were not able to consider the context and to understand how people were feeling, what meaning behind the words, and they had limited range of knowledge of professional areas. However they can translate much quickly than people.

The living of the future style

Our life links closely with our jobs and industry, so the way we live in the future will obviously change. Do you know it is said that Japan is already living in the future? Hence, I illustrate some objects in Japan.

Smart toilet- this is used especially at the nursing home or in the hospital. It can check our blood pressure, urine, protein, weight and body fat at the same time when we use this toilet. It can tell us a lot about our inner health.

Smart mirror – this mirror can notices winkles, redness, pores and sun damage and offers a range of suitable products when it addresses us.

The Archelis Chair- this is comfortable seats especially for surgeons who need supports during long surgeries. It covers around the legs and buttocks. It was made to relieve pain of pressure on the back, feet and legs with limited moving.

Those are the machines used especially in the hospital or nursing area.

Home robot- some of them can work as a housewife. They can cook, clean the room and so on.

Hotel robot- they help reception. They can speak foreign languages and lead guests to their rooms. Some hotels already use these robots as a receptionist.

Conclusion

Our lives and society have changed rapidly than we image. Digitalisation, automation and robotization are one of the biggest factors which affects our jobs directly. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a turning point in the history of an industry. However we need to notice that robots and AI can deal with things that have programmed in administratively without any feeling and emotion. They do not have ability to think what you are feeling. They can show answers or results of the problems but they cannot explain the process by getting them. We should admire to all processes because a lot of clues and new discoveries are hidden. Therefore we should have talents which only human being can do and we have responses to find out the facts. It is said that to survive in the future, we have to get skills which robots or artificial intelligence cannot substitute in. Yet, I believe gaining those skills is quite hard for us. Consequently, I suppose we should have three kinds of abilities. One is an ability to think proactively, not reactively. Second one is calming down and then judge the situation. The last one is flexibility to response to various problems or circumstances.