THE FUTURE

The Fourth Industrial Revolution can be accelerated if we can foster a conducive innovation ecosystem

IN his 2017 book Satya Nadella, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, says: “Artificial intelligence, mixed reality and quantum computing are going to be gamechangers… (They) will be more profound in (their) impact on the economy than those revolutions that came before.”

That is both scary and salutary.

It is scary because computers, driven by artificial intelligence, or AI, can think better and quicker. They can do tasks many times faster than a human. Then, the world’s chess champion, Garry Kasparov’s loss of a game to IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997, was merely a foretaste of last year’s loss to Google’s DeepMind by Lee Se-dol, a South Korean and one of the world’s best players of the ancient Chinese board game — Go.

AlphaGo, the AI-powered programme, went on to beat many others at the game, culminating in soundly beating this year Ke Ji, the world champion. Ke subsequently wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform: “I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”

With trillions of possible moves, Go is much more complex than chess. So, it might not have come as a surprise that man lost roundly to a machine.

But what is notable is that AlfaGo, as with other AI programmes, has a deep capacity to learn by playing endlessly with itself.

Such deep machine-learning enables an AI-driven computer to teach itself complicated tasks