Data Science: The Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning
In the not so distant future your lifespan will be longer than what it is now. There is evidence that the life span for human beings has changed for the better. We are living longer than we used to. To contextualize this, the quality of your life is much better than a king or queen’s life 200 years ago. Well, ok, maybe not entirely true but it is far much better than Shaka Zulu’s life. He was a king yet your lifespan is likely to be longer than his was. Machine Learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will greatly help humans to realise enhanced longevity.
When you think of it, the prospect for a longer life is exciting. Here, am talking about an exponentially longer life because you will have access to the best medicines that will target diseases at surgical precision. Your diagnosis will come way before there is an onset of a disease. That gives a lot of room to eliminate diseases. And therein lies the power of predictive analytics! Think of it another way, the food that you eat is mostly responsible for many an ailment. The food you will eat in the future will be farmed to do precisely the nourishing it is needed for. It will be optimized for that purpose only thereby eliminating all harm and bad effects. I assume this is why my doctor always says ‘…you get out what you put in’ when it comes to food.
Let me play devil’s advocate for a bit; if you had a device that showed you the number of days you are losing on earth because you are not eating the right food or not exercising as you should, would you change those two activities in order to prolong your life? Yes, you would! So just by that factor alone, you will change your behavior and start taking charge of a healthier lifestyle. Now imagine access to a whole host of tools that you can use to understand and manage your health at the command of your voice. Here is how it will work.
In your house, there will be a device that records the food that you eat and the times you exercise, therefore predict your health or the luck thereof based on your lifestyle. Actually, right now in many houses there are devices such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and Cortana that enable users to speak voice commands to interact with. Buy any of these gadgets and use it to call your favorite pizza joint! Oh yes, they know your favorite pizza! They even know the difference between Alex your coworker and Alex your husband! Wearables such as Fitbit measure your blood pressure, sleep pattern, steps taken in a day and pretty much truck your fitness.
Nest, for example, is a device that learns over time the optimal regulating of your home temperature. If your electric bills go up around this time of the year because of your cooling system, you will want this device. It will lower your bill by up to 40%. In other words, the house will only be warm or cold when it needs to be. It will switch on to cooling even when you are not home so that when you are back, it will not work as hard to create a conduce environment therefore saving you money and the convenience of a cool home on a hot October evening. What’s not to love about that?
I know I have thrown a bunch of gadget names, however, all you need are two; the first one is a house gadget and the other is a wearable. One for your house ‘health’ and another for your own health. Bear in mind that they collect data and that data lends itself to optimizing your lifestyle. Optimization will make your life much more efficient without a huge cost. With that, your health will improve significantly. You will not need to go to the physician if you have prevented that trip thus saving yourself some money and time. Time, you could spend with family and not watching soccer. Well, with a long life you will have a lot of time to watch your favorite soccer team nonetheless.
Back to a longer life; this will mean everything you do now will change with knowing that your life will be much longer than the average under or a little over 100 years. Not to sound dark but everything we do now is based on a subconscious fact that we will die, give or take within 100 years. Let’s say your lifespan moves to be between 250 – 300 years or we achieve negligible senescence. You will have more time to do whatever you have always wanted to do. Get to learn all the languages you have wanted to learn, learn how to sing, learn how to play a piano, take a two-year vacation to that exotic island that you have always wanted to go to but somehow couldn’t get time off from your busy schedule. It will change how you interact with things in your life. You can be excited or scared by this long-life prospect. Let’s explore the two!
Firstly, the exciting part. In the future, your car will be self-driving.It will be connected to every other car on the road so that it can help prevent road traffic accidents. Police on the road mounting roadblocks?
Well, that will be very odd, your kids will ask ‘… they used to do that?’
Actually, that future car has already arrived in many respects. Tesla, in my opinion, the most advanced and smart vehicle manufacturer in the world today has self-driving capability. Model S is a car that does not pollute the air. My favorite thing about this car was to ask my wicked smart 6-year-old neighbor to show me the exhaust pipes and produce a 20-dollar bill and tell him if he finds them, then the 20-dollar bill is his. There are none! I only did this twice until he came back the next day with a mind-blowing explanation of the engineering behind the car. If I had time to tell you how exciting this car is, I would make you want to buy it in three minutes.
Let me show you why self-driving is a big deal. When creating a Machine Learning model, usually, we are looking for one or two answers. A simple model like Price = Mileage + Year + Error is looking to predict the price of a car. We code the model to give one answer such as fraud detection. With self-driving, you are looking for the model to operate like a human mind. Self-driving does millions of complex models at the same time and make decisions and then updates itself and move to another set of millions of complex models as the car moves along. It will read road signs as well as all that is surrounding the road. It will know the difference between a tree and a road sign. The car will do that while you enjoy reading your favorite newspaper. Tesla Model S can drive on autopilot and ask you to put your hands on the steering when you need to or when it determines, predictively, eminent danger ahead.
All of what is described above is enabled by data. We are in an age where there is a lot of data being created. I personally argue that we are not creating more data but we have more means of collecting it as well as being able to process it quickly. All this is the power of AI.
Artificial Intelligence
So, what is Artificial Intelligence? Popularly known in the business as AI. It is the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. What AI is in everyday language is a bunch of codes that are written to tell the computer to learn something and use it to make a decision. An off the rack computer is as foolish today as it was yesterday because it cannot, for example, read the letter W if you wrote it on a piece of paper. The only difference and the illusion it creates is that it can add and process things at a quicker rate than humans. You have a much smarter brain than a computer!
Thanks to AI, you can now deposit a cheque on your phone by taking a picture. Facial recognition is used in anti-terror. Facebook can now auto tag your photos by facial recognition. That is all AI. You can now deposit a hand written cheque on an Automated Teller Machine that has a specialized AI software. Enter neural networks (NN). AI uses NN. In a nutshell, NN is a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system.
How it works without the complex math?
How does it works without the complex math? I will start explaining AI by explaining what Machine Learning is. Machine Learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of Artificial Intelligence based on the idea that