FREE FOR ALL
THE email said something like “you might be interested in this”.
I thought it was safe to click on the blue button that said something like “register now”. I was wrong. It was not safe at all. The email came from a work colleague who I trusted.
The company’s security software found nothing wrong with the email from Google Cloud or the link.
So, I clicked on the blue button and was transported.
This wasn’t a scam, but it still rocked my world.
It was an invitation to a Google Cloud webinar run by their CEO Diane Green called “Let’s Talk AI!” Of course, I clicked on it. Somewhere, in Google’s web of intrigue, my click was added to my profile for future reference.
The machines know I am watching them, the birth of their Skynet and how I need to know what’s coming down the pipe next from their brightest young Dr Frankensteins.
Then I watched the pre-show, a 15-minute interview with an altruistic young entrepreneur who had battled university mentors to launch an open source medical imaging platform using Google’s artificial intelligence technology.
That’s a mouthful, I know.
But the keywords in that sentence are “open source”. That means free to use. Right now, if I want to have some medical imaging done on my body it will cost me the arm and the leg that I’m getting scanned.
I’m lucky enough to live in a city positively buzzing with labs and people in white coats.
If I have my brain scanned, it will take a couple of hours to line up all the slices into a coherent 3D model of my nut.
We simply don’t have enough people to understand what’s going on in everyone’s brain, let alone mine.
Not only that, if I lived in Natimuk, I would need to saddle up my horse to find an MRI on the Cobb and Co adventure trail.
Hi-tech medicine is a closed system built on scarcity, one of those “must have” components of modern healthcare that is driving insurance premiums up and up - and it is not fairly distributed.
Imagine if we could cut those costs by letting AI scan all the images for us and do a better job at picking out the cancer cells.
Now, imagine if that software was free.
Firstly, it would bring enormous benefits for humanity, delivering hi-tech medical diagnostics and solutions to the world’s poorest countries.
It might even add a new civil right: that anyone, anywhere has the right to know in intimate detail the state of their health.
We’ve seen what the information revolution has done to the music, movie and media indus- tries.
I now have limitless access to the world’s music and movies, streamed to my devices, where a dozen years ago it cost me 15 bucks for each and every individual DVD or CD.
Take that idea and plug it into the wall socket of the so-called “internet of things”, where real tangible stuff is connected to each other like Lego bricks.
Shove those keywords “open source”, enabled by AI, in front of concepts such as transport, construction, financial services, education and anything to do with governance and the law. Open source building design. Open source commuting. Open source conveyancing and business management.
What if everything that could be learned, could be made free so that we are not limited by the number of specialists and the scarcity model?
Put an AI in the centre of a business problem, make it free, and watch what happens next.
That was the salient takeaway underpinning Diane Greene’s keynote.
We’re still in the early birth contractions of a society fundamentally organised by mathematics, where machines will answer many of our needs.
But, unlike other transformations such as trains, planes and automobiles which took decades to upset the natural order of things, machine learning is likely to have an exponential impact.
Artificial intelligence will change business models and now is the time to get ready.
If the brains of your next business are not actually yours, but an AI free to use in the cloud, what would you do?
I’ll wager it’s not what you’re doing now. Peter Judd is newsroom operations manager for News Corp and a former editor or the Geelong Advertiser.