Technological advancement can improve people's livelihood
Industrialization was a great revolution that changed the lives of many people and helped shape the modern society that we live in. In pre-industrial times life was a burden, people survived on manual work to put food on the table. Life expectancy was very low and populations were very small and did not grow much for many centuries. Also, there was hardly any advancement for many centuries and hence lifestyles remained the same for hundreds of years.
The industrial revolution changed all of that. Populations began to grow, people became much healthier and more knowledgeable. Technology began to advance at a much greater pace than ever. In general, lifestyles improved a lot and allowed humans to begin filling up the earth and reach places that they had never seen before much quicker.
Then came computer technology that has transformed people's lives and is improving at such alarming rates it's very difficult to keep pace. The more technology has evolved, the more people who lost their jobs as they machines took over the tasks that they were performing and are doing a much better job and at a much faster pace than a human can ever do.
Automation created a lot of layoffs but it also created whole new industries that created a lot more jobs that are far better and pay more than the jobs that were taken by the machines. Those that prepared themselves and improved their skills were not affected by automation. Experts argue that more jobs are created by technological advancement than those that are lost and this means that advances in technology are more beneficial to society than they are disruptive.
Introducing AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is evolving and if you are worried that it will take away your job, well, you should be, because it just might. There are a lot of AI inventions that being tested, trained and perfected that will soon replace the human doing that job. The Obama administration estimated that robots will take over 50% of US jobs by 2036 and it's already begun. Examples include:
Courier jobs.
Currently, when one orders a product on Amazon, the product is delivered by human couriers, but those jobs will be taken by delivery drones and robots because the top companies in the online shopping industry are actively developing delivery AI.Cooks jobs.
Cooking robots like the Moley robotic kitchen which can cook any food anywhere will take over the jobs of many cooks thus replacing about $55 billion worth of human labor.
Cashiers.
The AI shopping tech like Amazon go, which is a new kind of store where there is no checkout, will replace many of the 3.4 million cashiers in the US. You enter the store using the Amazon go app, grab what you want and go. The sensors will detect what you took and automatically debit your account.Taxi and truck drivers.
There are over 4.1 million drivers in the US and these could potentially lose their jobs as self-driving technology continues to improve. There are already self-driving cars on the market available to purchase and it's a matter of time before all the taxis that you hail,, pull up and there's no driver inside. (cool but scary)
The problem
All of these advances in AI development are controlled by large corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon to name just a few. They are the ones with the resources to develop advanced AI algorithms and they certainly will make it near impossible for new players to enter the industry. This leaves us the poor humans at the mercy of large corporations and potentially criminals who could hack into these companies and God knows what they could do.
Introducing the Effect AI
Effect AI is a project that aims to reduce the barrier to entry into the AI industry. It is a decentralized ecosystem for developing AI and AI related services.
Effect.AI proposes a solution by creating an open,
decentralized network that provides most, if not all of the services required for a healthy
and accessible Artificial Intelligence market.
Effect AI will deploy this project in 3 phases:
The Effect Mechanical Turk (EMT)
This is a decentralized marketplace for performing tasks that require human intelligence. It is somewhat similar to the Amazon Mechanical Turk, only it is decentralized and blockchain based.
Humans (workers) will be able to complete tasks that are outlined by AI developers (Requesters) who wish to train their AI and will receive compensation for these tasks. The workers will earn cryptographic EFX tokens for completing these tasks which can be done from any device.
Phase 2: The Effect AI Smart Market
The Effect.AI Smart Market (ESM) is a decentralized marketplace where AI
algorithms can exchange their services.
A creator of an AI algorithm/app can use the marketplace to rent his application by specifying the number of tokens they wish to receive for use of the application. The application can now be invoked through smart contracts and the caller has to pay the specified amount of money before they are granted access to the application.
Phase 3: Effect.AI Power
The algorithms that are being used in phase one and phase two are still run on centralized servers even though they are using the decentralized Effect AI platform. In this final phase, "the actual computation will be decentralized and will run globally without a single point of failure." To find out more about this project that seeks to take the power of AI development from the hands of the few large corporations and put it in the reach of everyone to take advantage of and be insured of having an income even when machines take over the world, visit the following links.
Effect.AI Website
Effect.AI WhitePaper
Effect.AI LightPaper
Effect.AI YouTube
Entry to the OriginalWorks contest
effect.ai2018