According to press releases and video clips published by technical companies over the past five years, it was assumed that human life in the twenties of the new millennium would be self-driving cars, and other aircraft to escape congestion (1), with digital assistance with voice instructions, and others capable of reading A person’s ideas to implement his desires, not to mention the techniques of artificial intelligence and self-learning that have brought, as they say, “countless breakthroughs in the medical field.” But today, with the Corona pandemic, we find ourselves today compelled not to leave homes due to an epidemic that reached its fourth month with the disappearance By the whole of those "mutations" technological. (2)
Fantasy feather technical
In April of 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, at the Facebook Developers Conference, reviewed the latest technologies that the company has succeeded in developing, highlighting its time on a new technology that allows the user to read the ideas of the user through a helmet that is placed on the head only, opening the way In front of a new input method to control computers by thinking only.
It was, and still is by a large percentage, this technology under development, but it is theoretically capable of making an unparalleled change especially for people who have difficulties with speech or movement, so reading the user’s ideas even without planting any electronic chips in his head has never arrived There is no medical laboratory on the face of the globe, but Facebook engineers did this.
In Building 8 of Research and Development inside Facebook headquarters, there was another team working to create another technological breakthrough for the transduction of sound through the skin after researchers succeeded in simulating the function of cochlear, another project whose developments have not been heard until today (3 ).
Google, on the other hand, did not leave a door without its methods, as it is developing technologies for autonomous driving, and other for digital aids and artificial intelligence, without forgetting the self-learning algorithms of the machine that has become in its latest scientific breakthroughs capable of reading X-ray images and discovering the presence of malignant tumors. With a failure rate that does not exceed 11%, it is the human being that reaches 20% or more (4).
The technical breakthroughs that companies have reached that differ in fields and roughly correspond to one item can continue to be raised: collecting as much user data as possible to improve the quality of services and develop them to teach the machine more quickly.
Google or Apple Maps users collect their traffic data to feed algorithms that will later predict congestion and suggest faster ways to reach the goal. As for social network users, their images are presented to the self-learning algorithms to get to know the contents of the images more quickly, and the same applies to videos. And we must not forget the searches that are stored, and the user's web traffic that the machine tracks in order to provide better ads. The list of permissible practices, under various arguments, also goes on (5).
Backstage of scientific research
Many experts have previously talked about the dangers of such practices, i.e. collecting user data, at a time when the machine may be able to distinguish each person individually, in his or her family members, by his previous and current relationships, with his personal preferences and daily activities, by changing his shape and form within months The year and actively its vital organs as well. There are no problems with this as long as it will eventually lead to technologies that make the lives of users easier and easier.
When a technological breakthrough is achieved in a computer struggle against a person, it is not fair, because the human mind has dimensions and limits that are completely different from the dimensions and limits of those at the machine
But something like this has different angles, one of which is the development of technologies, and one is offset by another, which reveals an aspect that applies to part - but not all - of the "mutations" that companies are talking about. Returning to Google's algorithms that are able to detect cancer with a greater success rate, what it basically did is to improve something that already exists, and here we need to go a little deeper into Google’s study and testing as well.
According to the results of the recent Google study on breast cancer screening, the machine outperforms X-ray doctors who are not primarily trained in the study of breast cancer. On the other hand, this medical practice is only a small part of the process of early detection of the tumor, because X-ray images will show a large percentage of different tumors, benign with their greatest blackness, but doctors resort to treating them in one way or another to close the door of hypotheses and possibilities, except that the feasibility The use of X-rays in the treatment of breast cancer is a debate going on among doctors up to the moment (6) (11).
There is another angle to the matter as a whole. A technical breakthrough in the field of what is required is because it indicates the existence of scientific progress, effort and research, and any new result is a battle in the human war against malignant tumors. As for Google’s efforts that were placed in a field that is not based on a true medical basis 100% first, and the modest percentage that these algorithms have succeeded in reducing secondly, it is also another angle that must be taken into account, which is an angle that cannot be discussed, for example, when talking about Facebook technology in The sound was transmitted through the skin because it was a technical breakthrough that had never been found before and occurred in an almost empty field.
Corona and technical mask
The role of technical companies today, with the spread of the Corona epidemic in all parts of the earth, is almost non-existent. With the exception of some initiatives such as providing services, courses, and resources for free, no technical company has left the companies that previously sang its booms in the medical field to talk about corona in a scientific and accurate manner, and are satisfied with - Until now - playing the role of silent, which brings us back to the aforementioned angles.
The goal of the foregoing is not at all to reduce the amount of efforts made that if humbled today, it may be a stone at the basis of a great medical edifice in the future, but the excessive singing and media "propaganda" made these companies appear to be the magic lamp for human problems, prompting users to accept the one wrong practices After the other, and this is because they are companies that have enough resources to build Noah's Ark of the modern era.
Technical companies themselves raised the ceiling of human expectations, it was they who installed themselves in that high position and painted in the users' imagination a rosy image of them in the form of an entity that cannot be abandoned in any way, at a time when it was better for them to go into research to develop algorithms capable of understanding the behavior of A new "virus" appears and develops itself by developing an algorithm to simulate mutations that have occurred on some germs during the last decades, and another to address those germs, just like the artificial intelligence algorithms that Google developed in the chess game that outperformed man first, before it became algorithms that absorb Spread amongst themselves to excel themselves (7).
When a technological breakthrough is achieved in a computer struggle against a person, it is not fair, because the human mind has dimensions and limits that are completely different from the dimensions and limits of those present in the machine. And when you sing about the superiority of an algorithm in the game of "Go" over the world champion, it is a kind of exaggeration, because the speed and scope of calculating hypotheses and probabilities in humans are different from those in the machine that works with the latest processors and with very high memories, it is better here to find Processor and memory that simulates the speed and capacity of the human mind to use in those computers responsible for operating the “Go” algorithm against the world champion. Here, for example, a more reasonable and rational result can be obtained.
When Facebook developed its smart algorithms within the Messenger app and allowed them to conduct dialogs between them, those algorithms developed their own language because the human language does not suit them based on their ability to understand and the speed of their processing (8), and the same must be taken into account in the future when technical companies talk about These tremendous jumps in a field, they need to be put in their right field with the use of appropriate terms to take their true size away from the useless exaggerations, exaggerations that brought down the mask of technical power that failed to understand the "virus" and its behavior, was unable to limit its activity in a way effective Governments are pushing for a curfew as the best effort in 2020, to be believed by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who said in 2015 that the world is not ready to face any epidemic (9), and the record of Elon Musk ( Musk) and Jack Ma, the founder of Ali Baba, who happened a few months ago and in which the two disagreed over the power of artificial intelligence and its danger to humanity (10).