The singularity is here!

Originally published 2 February 2018 on LinkedIn. Preserved here as written, including the bits that have since aged interestingly. Reflected on at greater length in I was right about the singularity. I was wrong about the wires.

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Did you know the telephone was the first virtual reality technology?

It took us five decades to adopt it as a commodity of life. It took fewer decades than that to adopt radios and televisions. Yet we swiftly embraced the PC and mobile phone in less than one. We speed up adopting new technologies because we use new capabilities to create them. This reduces how long it takes for us to adopt the next "big thing."

Ray Kurzweil proved that the rate of adopting new ideas doubles every decade. He elaborated on this phenomenon in his book, The Singularity is Near, and concluded that mankind would converge with machines by 2030. The World Economic Forum took notice and labelled the phenomenon as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They describe it as "a fusion of technologies that blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres."

Today, we are interacting with machines in ways that were once the exclusive territory of humans. Chatbots, or virtual assistants, are the first evidence of machines interacting with humans in human-like ways. Microsoft's Cortana helps you with any search topic from your Windows 10 device by speaking or typing into a prompt. Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, is embedded into a table-top device and receives verbal commands. Currently, chatbots are prone to error and often cause human frustration when they give an incorrect response. However, they are growing in popularity because they are simple to use and perform tasks quickly — Amazon sold over 10 million Alexas in 2017.

If we embrace artificial intelligence into our daily lives, what will it mean for our workforce?

Imagine this: you are a new customer service representative for a utility company. Your colleagues are quitting due to boredom. The utility company implements a new system. Your pleasant voice greets callers on the first ring with "How can I help?" Your voice and personality answers hundreds of simultaneous calls. Only when your alter-ego trips up and can't complete the task will you personally take the call.

The customer feels like he is important to the utility company because they are providing a human to help him. You hired out your voice and some personality traits to the utility company to answer calls and provide the "human touch" to their brand. Now you can take your daughter to school or watch your son's dance recital while "you" are working. You are paid through new usage terms and conditions that give you flexibility and increase work/life balance.

The customer service scenario may sound preposterous, but the technologies already exist.

• Montreal-based start-up Lyrebird created a system to mimic a person's voice.
• Google's DeepMind research company developed a deep neural network that synthesises realistic human speech.
• Microsoft is making it easy to integrate artificial understanding into nearly any software application with Cognitive Services.
• Large consultancies, like Avanade, are stitching emerging technologies together and helping customers use them to increase revenue or drive down cost.

Organisations must digitally transform to compete for customers, regardless of the challenges.

Artificial intelligence promises a way forward. "We can't predict any particular project, but the result of this whole worldwide, chaotic, unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable," said Ray Kurzweil in 2005. With investment into artificial intelligence by organisations expected to grow from $640 million in 2016 to $37 billion by 2025, the scenario I describe is possible and humans are destined to make it business as usual.

The singularity is here!

— maria, 2018