DIPA: Good morning, Mr. James.

Me: Good morning, how are you today?

DIPA: I'm bright as always, I hope you had a good night's sleep?

Me: Of course.

DIPA: If you don't mind my saying, you look a bit distracted, is there anything I can do in particular?

Me: I'm fine, how is my schedule for today?

DIPA: Well, your first appointment for today is in an hour's time, you will be meeting your physiotherapist at 8:00 am. Afterwards, you will be attending Sam's wedding reception at mid day. You also wanted me to remind you of your dinner date with Rose, how is she anyways?

Me: Lol, she's great, thanks a lot.

DIPA: You are most certainly welcomed Mr. James. But are you sure you are OK?

Me: I'm fine.

DIPA: But.....

Me: (interrupting), I said I'm fine. (switches DIPA off)

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Damn DIPA, she just doesn't know when to shut up.

Hmm, it's the morning of January 15, 2035, how I wish my good friend Kate was alive to see this day. She had always been a stronger believer in the prospects of Artificial Intelligence than I ever was. About 17 years today, Kate and I had this crazy idea (at least it was at the time) of developing an Artificial Personal Secretary: an AI based Operating System that could be integrated into your laptops, smart phones, cars, CCTV cameras and any other feasible electronic gadgets. The Idea was to create a system that could gather, coordinate and manipulate information, learn from this information, but most importantly, use it to make decisions and provide services that was best suited for each individual user. After a few days of brainstorming, we came out with the name DIPA (Digital Personal Assistant) for our AI.

Today, DIPA is the 3rd most widely used AI across the globe, serving and changing the lives of millions of people daily. Besides being integrated into a person's electronic gadgets, the AI comes with smart glasses ( spectacles coupled with a listening device that can see and here everything within a person's immediate environment once it's on). The system is developed to be able to make and cancel personal appointments, offer voice reminders of a user's schedule, create written notes based on a specific instructions as well as offer useful suggestions on a person's lifestyle choices. It can additionally recognize a person's mood and react appropriately. With DIPA, there's only one click between you and all the assistance you will ever need.

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Before Kate passed away 7 years ago, we had made significant progress in the development of our AI. However, there were a few challenges we were struggling to overcome. As I recollect, there were 3 key obstacles that stood in our way.

First of all, in order for computers to act and behave like us, they need to learn from us. Even as humans, it takes several years for us to learn how to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong and what to do under different circumstances. I am sure you will agree with me that our entire lives is a learning process, with each of us encountering new situations everyday. This is not very different with machines, we needed to subject our AI to as many different possible scenarios as possible. This would normally require the processing of large data sets, and this was one of our major challenges.

Secondly, it was necessary for our AI to be capable of diverging tasks. For example, we needed DIPA to be able to recognize a person's mood while engaging them in a conversation. This task is outside of the primary or basic function of our AI. So, to achieve this, it was necessary to create an entire system dedicated to mood recognition. The ability of the AI to corroborate and switch between tasks in order to achieve a desired outcome is simply referred to as diverging tasks.

Lastly, as you can guess from the capabilities of DIPA, our AI analysis a series of highly complex algorithms in order to arrive at some of its functions. This incurs huge computational costs. The amount of computing power required for the AI to function effectively, can be very expensive.

The EFFECT.AI Story

About 16 years ago, while lamenting about our challenges, a friend suggested we try out the EFFECT.AI. In simple terms, the EFFECT.AI is a decentralize platform for Artificial Intelligence built under the Effect Network. It is aimed at giving developers like myself, access to a wide data set, a lucrative market place and a means to provide the requisite computational power to sustain it our AIs. For kate and I, this was a dream come true and the answer to a prayer we never made. As you would guess, EFFECT.AI is the reason we have DIPA today.

How Does It Work?

EFFECT.AI solved our problems using 3 sub-platforms, at the time, it was referred to as Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3.

Phase 1 (the Mechanical Turk) : this took care of our first challenge, where we needed to process a large data set to help teach our AI. The M-Turk provided us with a huge and cheap work force necessary for the completion of our AI. With this, a user can request or perform simple tasks from anywhere in the world and at anytime for a fee. So we had the opportunity to pay lots of users to perform a variety of tasks including but not limited to making or canceling appointments, requesting written notes and asking for lifestyle advice. Since the platform allowed us to interact with our clients directly, we saved money that would have gone to third parties.

Phase 2 ( Smart Market): You can imagine how devastated we would have been if after going through all this trouble, we finally came through with our AI, only to realize that there was no market on which to sell it. This is where the Effect Smart Market comes in. It affords developers who have successfully completed their algorithms, a convenient and profitable place of exchange. Here, algorithms can be sold, rented or given out for the Effect token.

Phase 3 (Effect Power): DIPA performs tasks that are as close to human as possible and after each major update, it only gets better. Apparently, this kind of tasks require a high computational power base. The Effect power is a decentralized source of computing power which utilizes power from different sources across the globe. This feature makes it reliable and dependable. DIPA currently runs on the Effect Power network.

Summary

Today, I am writing from my multi-billion dollar mansion, as a partner and major share holder of PhinTech ( an international conglomerate that focuses on the development and sale of AIs). After they contacted me a few years back on EFFECT.AI, we entered into an agreement in which I surrounded my AI to them under certain conditions. After PhinTech took ownership of DIPA, it quickly gained international recognition and has risen to the 3rd most used AI in the world today. As I write this piece, the AI market is presently worth over a whooping $20 trillion and is estimated to reach double by 2040. Anytime I tell people about my success story, I always end by saying these 3 words:

EFFECT.AI Made Me.

This Article was submitted by @ultraremedy as part of @originalworks Sponsored Writing Contest. Check it out here.

The Great Team

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