The Troggs were a legendary rock and roll band who were part of the British Invasion in the late 1960’s. They have always been best known for their iconic rocker Wild Thing. This was also the only Top 10 hit that ever had an ocarina solo. How cool is that! The band went on to have two other major hits, With a Girl Like You and Love is All Around.¹

The third of the band’s classic singles can be stretched a bit to be used as a helpful metaphor to describe an emerging form pervasive “all around”-edness, this time in a more technological context. Upon reading a fascinating recent article on TechCrunch.com entitled The Next Stop on the Road to Revolution is Ambient Intelligence, by Gary Grossman, on May 7, 2016, you will find a compelling (but not too rocking) analysis about how the rapidly expanding universe of digital intelligent systems wired into our daily routines is becoming more ubiquitous, unavoidable and ambient each day.

All around indeed. Just as romance can dramatically affect our actions and perspectives, studies now likewise indicate that the relentless global spread of smarter – – and soon thereafter still smarter – – technologies is comparably affecting people’s lives at many different levels.²

We have followed just a sampling of developments and trends in the related technologies of artificial intelligence, machine learning, expert systems and swarm intelligence in these 15 Subway Fold posts. I believe this new article, adding “ambient intelligence” to the mix, provides a timely opportunity to bring these related domains closer together in terms of their common goals, implementations and benefits. I highly recommend reading Mr. Grossman’s piece it in its entirety.

I will summarize and annotate it, add some additional context, and then pose some of my own Trogg-inspired questions.

Internet of Experiences

Digital this, that and everything is everywhere in today’s world. There is a surging confluence of connected personal and business devices, the Internet, and the Internet of Things (I0T) ³. Woven closely together on a global scale, we have essentially built “a digital intelligence network that transcends all that has gone before”. In some cases, this quantum of advanced technologies gains the “ability to sense, predict and respond to our needs”, and is becoming part of everyone’s “natural behaviors”.

A forth industrial revolution might even manifest itself in the form of machine intelligence whereby we will interact with the “always-on, interconnected world of things”. As a result, the Internet may become characterized more by experiences where users will converse with ambient intelligent systems everywhere. The supporting planks of this new paradigm include:

• Mobile computing⁴
• Cloud computing
• Big data⁵
• Neural networks
• Deep learning
• Artificial intelligence

A prediction of what more fully realized ambient intelligence might look like using travel as an example appeared in an article entitled Gearing Up for Ambient Intelligence, by Lisa Morgan, on InformationWeek.com on March 14, 2016. Upon leaving his or her plane, the traveler will receive a welcoming message and a request to proceed to the curb to retrieve their luggage. Upon reaching curbside, a self-driving car⁶ will be waiting with information about the hotel booked for the stay.

Listening

Another article about ambient intelligence entitled Towards a World of Ambient Computing, by Simon Bisson, posted on ZDNet.com on February 14, 2014, is briefly quoted for the line “We will talk, and the world will answer”, to illustrate the point that current technology will be morphing into something in the future that would be nearly unrecognizable today. Grossman’s article proceeds to survey a series of commercial technologies recently brought to market as components of a fuller ambient intelligence that will “understand what we are asking” and provide responsive information.

Starting with Amazon’s Echo, this new device can, among other things:

• Answer certain types of questions
• Track shopping lists
• Place orders on Amazon.com
• Schedule a ride with Uber
• Operate a thermostat
• Provide transit schedules
• Commence short workouts
• Review recipes
• Perform math
• Request a plumber
• Provide medical advice

Will it be long before we begin to see similar smart devices everywhere in homes and businesses?

Kevin Kelly, the founding Executive Editor of WIRED and a renowned futurist⁷, believes that in the near future, digital intelligence will become available in the form of a utility⁸ and, as he puts it “IQ as a service”. This is already being done by Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft who are providing open access to sections of their AI coding.⁹ He believes that success for the next round of startups will go to those who enhance and transforms something already in existence with the addition of AI. The best example of this is once again self-driving cars.

As well, in a chapter on Ambient Computing from a report by Deloitte UK entitled Tech Trends 2015, it was noted that some products were engineering ambient intelligence into their products as a means to remain competitive.

Recommending

A great deal of AI is founded upon the collection of big data from online searching, the use of apps and the IoT. This universe of information supports neural networks learn from repeated behaviors including people’s responses and interests. In turn, it provides a basis for “deep learning-derived personalized information and services” that can, in turn, derive “increasingly educated guesses with any given content”.

An alternative perspective, that “AI is simply the outsourcing of cognition by machines”, has been expressed by Jason Silva, a technologist, philosopher and video blogger on Shots of Awe. He believes that this process is the “most powerful force in the universe”, that is, of intelligence. Nonetheless, he sees this as an evolutionary process which should not be feared. (See also the December 27, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled Three New Perspectives on Whether Artificial Intelligence Threatens or Benefits the World.)

Bots are another contemporary manifestation of ambient intelligence. These are a form of software agent, driven by algorithms, that can independently perform a range of sophisticated tasks. Two examples include:

• Facebook’s News Feed uses bots for its Trending implementation on users’ home pages. (This was the subject of much controversy in the media and by some US politicians last week when an article posted on May 9, 2016 on Gizmodo.com by Michael Nunez alleged in its title Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.)
• TechCrunch’s Personalized New B0t that presents news relevant to users’ interest, driven by deep learning technology.

Speaking

Optimally, bots should also be able to listen and “speak” back in return much like a 2-way phone conversation. This would also add much-needed context, more natural interactions and “help to refine understanding” to these human/machine exchanges. Such conversations would “become an intelligent and ambient part” of daily life.

An example of this development path is evident in Google Now. This service combines voice search with predictive analytics to present users with information prior to searching. It is an attempt to create an “omniscient assistant” that can reply to any request for information “including those you haven’t thought of yet”.

Recently, the company created a Bluetooth-enable prototype of lapel pin based on this technology that operates just by tapping it much like the communicators on Star Trek. (For more details, see Google Made a Secret Prototype That Works Like the Star Trek Communicator, by Victor Luckerson, on Time.com, posted on November 22, 2015.)

The configurations and specs of AI-powered devices, be it lapel pins, some form of augmented reality¹⁰ headsets or something else altogether, supporting such pervasive and ambient intelligence are not exactly clear yet. Their development and introduction will take time but remain inevitable.

Will ambient intelligence make our lives any better? It remains to be seen, but it is probably a viable means to handle some of more our ordinary daily tasks. It will likely “fade into the fabric of daily life” and be readily accessible everywhere.

Quite possibly then, the world will truly become a better place to live upon the arrival of ambient intelligence-enabled ocarina solos.

My Questions

• Does the emergence of ambient intelligence, in fact, signal the arrival of a genuine fourth industrial revolution or is this all just a semantic tool to characterize a broader spectrum of smarter technologies?
• How might this trend affect overall employment in terms of increasing or decreasing jobs on an industry by industry basis and/or the entire workforce? (See also this June 4, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled How Robots and Computer Algorithms Are Challenging Jobs and the Economy.)
• How might this trend also effect non-commercial spheres such as public interest causes and political movements?
• As ambient intelligence insinuates itself deeper into our online worlds, will this become a principal driver of new entrepreneurial opportunities for startups? Will ambient intelligence itself provide new tools for startups to launch and thrive?

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1. Thanks to Little Steven (@StevieVanZandt) for keeping the band’s music in occasional rotation on The Underground Garage (#UndergroundGarage.) Also, for an appreciation of this radio show see this August 14, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled The Spirit of Rock and Roll Lives on Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

2. For a remarkably comprehensive report on the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, see the Pew Research Center report entitled U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015, by Aaron Smith, posted on April 1, 2015.

3. These 10 Subway Fold posts touch upon the IoT.

4. The Subway Fold category Big Data and Analytics contains 50 posts cover this topic in whole or in part.

5. The Subway Fold category Telecommunications contains 12 posts cover this topic in whole or in part.

6. These 5 Subway Fold posts contain references to self-driving cars.

7. Mr. Kelly is also the author of a forthcoming book entitled The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, to be published on June 7, 2016 by Viking.

8. This September 1, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled Possible Futures for Artificial Intelligence in Law Practice, in part summarized an article by Steven Levy in the September 2014 issue of WIRED entitled Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask. This covered a startup called Viv Labs whose objective was to transform AI into a form of utility. Fast forward to the Disrupt NY 2016 conference going on in New York last week. On May 9, 2016, the founder of Viv, Dag Kittlaus, gave his presentation about the Viv platform. This was reported in an article posted on TechCrunch.com entitled Siri-creator Shows Off First Public Demo of Viv, ‘the Intelligent Interface for Everything’, by Romain Dillet, on May 9, 2016. The video of this 28-minute presentation is embedded in this story.

9. For the full details on this story see a recent article entitled The Race Is On to Control Artificial Intelligence, and Tech’s Future by John Markoff and Steve Lohr, published in the March 25, 2016 edition of The New York Times.

10. These 10 Subway Fold posts cover some recent trends and development in augmented reality.

Editor’s Note – this article reprinted with the permission of the author – first published on his blog – The Subway Fold.