Harry Shum is Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Research area. Of Chinese origin, he studied at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the American universities that in the United States is a constant hotbed of talent on Artificial Intelligence. Shum is still in the United States, working for the giant Microsoft, the only technology that remains after ten years in the top five of the companies with the largest market capitalization in the world .
While other Chinese colleagues who were at Microsoft, such as Qi Lu, who is now the Chief Operating Officer of Baidu -also known as Chinese Google-, or Kai-Fu Lee who created the world’s first speech recognition system in 1988 and worked at Apple, Microsoft and Google, they have returned to their home country , Shum remains faithful to the company created by Bill Gates.
And as the head of Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, he has developed an extensive document entitled ‘The calculated future. The role of Artificial Intelligence in Society ‘ , some of the keys to this new technology that is already revolutionizing all areas of Society and Companies, and that experts such as Mckinsey, Forrester, Gartner or Strategy Analytic, to name some point out as the cause that is going to cause, if it is not already doing so, the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Shum dares to predict that “in the year 2038 digital devices will help us do more with one of our most precious assets, time .” And it lists some of the advantages of using this type of device in different situations of everyday life.
In 20 years , the Chinese executive points out, we could have our first meeting of the day without leaving our home , and not in the office, using our HoloLens device, or another similar device, in a meeting that would use augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. and in which you could interact with colleagues and clients around a virtual boardroom powered by mixed reality (virtual and augmented).
The presentation and observations of the conclave would be automatically translated into the native language of each participant , which they would listen to through a headset or telephone. A digital assistant would automatically prepare a meeting summary with the tasks assigned to the participants and reminders placed on their schedules based on the conversation that took place and the decisions that the participants made.
When we leave home, after the meeting – we are still in 2038 – a vehicle without a driver will take us to another work appointment, and while we are in the autonomous car we could see a presentation on the digital Hub of the car .
At the same time, our virtual assistant will summarize , for example, information and data extracted from recently published articles and reports, creating infographics to review through holographs or through the augmented reality of the driverless vehicle in which we move to another place. The intelligent assistant , also according to our instructions, will automatically answer routine emails, and redirect those that can be managed by other managers of our team .
And Harry Shum goes on to explain how a smart device will permanently monitor our vital signs for health . When something is wrong the virtual assistant , Microsoft’s own Cortana, Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s Bixby, or Amazon’s Alexa, will schedule a doctor’s appointment and track and schedule checkups, vaccinations and routine exams .
Artificial intelligence , it is said in the text edited by Microsoft, will help our doctor to analyze the results using around a terabyte -1,000 Gigabytes- of health data, helping to accurately diagnose and prescribe an ad hoc treatment . Immediately, the medication will arrive at our home brought by a drone , and the virtual assistant will remind us by voice how and when to take it . Our smart butler will monitor progress and, if we don’t improve, ask permission to book a new follow-up appointment with the doctor.
If we look back 20 years , instead of 20 years ahead, in 1998 in Spain , for example, there were only around 7.5 million mobile phone users, compared to the more than 50 million mobile lines that exist now, and the maximum speed of mobile data transmission did not even reach 80 kbps with the technology of that time, the GPRS, compared to the current 300 Mbps that we can reach with 4G.
Nobody could imagine 20 years ago that four decades later we could be talking about Terabytes , Petabytes or Zettabytes , or data transmission speeds that this year will reach 1 Gbps, or how today Artificial Intelligence already allows us to use devices that They help us manage our leisure and work .
Although on the horizon there are fears that haunt society in the use of Artificial Intelligence, and which we will undoubtedly talk about in this Blog in future articles, the benefits, as Stephen Hawking himself has pointed out on multiple occasions, and despite point out the dangers, they will be much greater.
And one of these much-talked-about dangers is job loss . In this sense, the consulting firm Gartner says that Artificial Intelligence will create in 2020 around 2.3 million new jobs, while it will destroy 1.8 million. It will create more than it will destroy, says Gartner. And not even today we can glimpse the new jobs that will emerge with artificial intelligence in 20 years.
“Before long,” says Harry Shum, ” many mundane and repetitive tasks will be performed automatically by intelligent machines , freeing us from spending our time and energy to be more productive and creative, and to make significant advances in areas such as health, agriculture, education or transportation “.
Before, or at the same time, other relevant issues such as privacy, cybersecurity or even ethics will have to be resolved, to ensure that Artificial Intelligence is used in a responsible, fair, transparent, inclusive and safe manner.
