The world as you see it now could be totally different in as little as 10 years time. Technology evolves rapidly, and some are even concerned that it is leaving humanity behind. However, I don't think they are giving humanity enough credit. We are evolving too. Maybe not in as clear ways as technology, but at a societal level I think we are growing very quickly. Artificial Intelligence is a scary word for some people, because it signifies a reduction in labor which they feel will lead many to be without work. However, I don't think that's necessarily the case. The work will still be there. It will just be very, very different.
Labor has been transforming since mankind invented it. How many jobs that were once common place are no longer around? Instead, replaced by something that made our lives easier. On the other side of the spectrum, how many jobs exist now that would have been unfathomable to exist even as little as 20 years ago? Certainly nobody was earning any Steemit money in the 90's or was a Youtube star or an Instagram influencer, but those are all real things that people do to make money now, and those opportunities will continue to appear. The point of this is to establish that AI is not a threat, but a tool, and the blockchain will only make it better.
In fact, Effect.AI is starting this journey in a place you might not expect. With people. A lot ofpeople actually, and they're giving them jobs. You've most likely heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but if not it's a micro job platform where users are paid for completing small tasks like listening to audio, testing a webpage or something similar. While the payouts are not huge they are there if you're dedicated enough to make a go at it. This platform is mostly used for companies to collect data. For example, a company called AudioKite, uses Mturk to give independent artists access to listening focus groups to evaluate their albums before release. Thus far Amazon have been the prime service in this space, but now this decentralized blockchain project is challenging them with the goal of training AI services.
What? Well, in order to have artificial intelligence you must first have genuine intelligence, and so they plan to train AI by using the actions of these users. By joining Effect.AI you'll be asked to complete a number of tasks to help with this advancement. These include things like transcribing audio, labeling things or sorting images. Mostly very burdensome work that is very simple, but difficult to have performed since it does not require permanent employees. These are perfect jobs for AI to complete. While it may seem like training a computer to perform these actions would be taking away jobs the truth is these are very small tasks that would otherwise not be particularly financially rich anyway. It also has the benefit of enabling the advancement of many services and even open source organizations who do not have the manpower or the budget to do them, but may provide a very valuable service to the public. In turn, these services will actually create better jobs than the ones being lost.
By utilizing smart contracts the developer of the AI can use the data gathered by the workers to train their AI algorithm for whatever type of application they are developing. These types of AI interfaces are already being used by app creators for things like re-targeting or customer service for small businesses who are run by perhaps one person that just does not have time to do everything, but they also may not be able to afford to hire assistants to do these small tasks that take up a lot of their time.
Not only will you be able to train your AI or be paid for completing tasks to help train them, but they also plan to launch a fully decentralized network that will power these AI as well. You will then be able to buy and sell them. Software as a service is already big business, and it seems it's going to only get bigger as the world opens up new ways for smaller developers to profit from their work. The blockchain is not only going to expand those opportunities, but it will also make the entire process more efficient for everyone involved.
Let's imagine that you are a small seller on an ecommerce platform. You are the sole employee. Your day is so full you want to cry. What's the most annoying, repetitive task you have to complete over and over everyday? It's most likely answering the same question over and over again asked in a slightly different way, but is already answered a hundred times on social media or your FAQ. You can't afford to hire anyone to deal with your Social Media, but maybe an AI could do it for you? What if they could convincingly answer these questions and perform the most mundane customer service aspects for you. AI are not perfect, but even if they could not answer every single question they most likely could respond to 98% of what people asked without issue. That not only provides the fastest customer service possible, but it also takes a giant mound of work off your plate so you can focus on things like growing your business or actually getting some sleep for once.
Now, let's imagine that you're a developer, and you want to make an AI robot to integrate with social media platforms to provide these customer service updates. You can't just unleash it into the world. It needs training and testing. So, you decide to use a platform like effect.ai to train it. This gives you instant access to real focus groups of people that can send you feedback about their experience and using their data you can improve your AI. These taskers could help the software to identify which questions require which answers. For example, it could use them to learn about questions asked in a different way, but requiring the same answer or to help narrow down solutions to ones that are not as straight forward or trickier.
There are so many ways that AI can be used to enhance our lives, and a decentralized network like effect.ai puts the power to develop this powerful software in the hands of more people. It's hard to say exactly what aspects of our lives AI will take over in the future. In fact, I feel that the entire labor network will soon be totally different, but I don't see that as being so scary. I see it as phasing out jobs nobody really wanted, and creating higher value jobs in their place. Artificial Intelligence is here to take your job away, and it will most likely give you an even better one. This was my entry for the Original Works Contest.
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