We live in a world of innovations. There have been waves of technical innovations since the 1800s. Be it the steam engine, electric power, or information technology (IT), each wave has brought upon robust changes and paradigm shifts. These changes transformed both household life as well as the ways in which businesses were conducted. And each of these had its own buckets of prerequisites and problems.

However, the fourth wave or the Fourth Revolution that commenced with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is different. It is based on technologies that are integrating digital, physical, and biological worlds. Technological changes are getting quicker, the time between invention and automation is getting shorter, and automation is taking up eons-old human activities.

The application of AI has already stretched across areas like political science, education, manufacturing, e-commerce, and healthcare, and now it is also permeating the domain of human existence. We have witnessed an advanced version of AI in the fictional world of films and television where digital avatars closely resemble humans.

But what if it happens in real? What if a humanlike version of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or TARS from Interstellar stands in front of us? Well, with AI, we are actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of feeling and thinking. And UneeQ has apparently already embarked on the journey with its digital humans.

The tech company uses digital avatars as visual interfaces for virtual assistants, customer service chatbots, and other applications. These avatars are humanlike not just in terms of tone of voice or language but facial movements too. UneeQ’s digital humans can raise eyebrows, tilt their heads, smile, and even wink – creepy yet astonishing.

These Digi-humans are modeled on human features, with specific emotions and facial expressions encoded in their response. Speech recognition is used to make them understand what a person is saying and natural language processing crafts a response, thus transforming a transaction into an interaction.

Apparently, UneeQ is not the only enterprise following the trend of humanizing computing, there’s a long trail. ObEN, an AI company uses digital avatars as virtual identities for gaming characters, influencers, and celebrities in the entertainment industry. Soul Machines, on the other hand, employs a biological approach. The AGI Company uses a ‘digital brain’ that simulates the human brain to modulate the emotions felt and expressed by its digital humans.

Amelia, an IPsoft company, also employs a similar approach to build its ‘digital employees’. It imitates specific parts of the human brain involved with memory to curate responses to queries. And with each interaction, its Digi-humans learn to deliver personalized and more engaging experiences.

And that is quite an evidence that AI-powered Digital Humans are no more futuristic technology. They have already permeated into domains like banking, insurance, healthcare, retail, wealth management, tourism, property development, and automotive industries. They are solving some of the biggest problems in the history of mankind.

Digital humans have brought us to the cusp of colossal changes. However, whether this journey is embarkment towards constructive road or destruction one, is still unknown. As Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy says, “This is a moment of choice and opportunity. It could be the best 10 years ahead of us that we have ever had in human history or one of the worst because we have more power than we have ever had before.

While on one hand, AI amplifies human effectiveness, it also poses a threat to human autonomy, agency, and capabilities. These digital humans may possibly exceed human abilities in complex tasks like decision making, pattern recognition, reasoning and learning, visual acuity, and language translation. The said ‘smart’ systems might make our life more automatic than autonomous.

A possible scenario of the next decade is that we won’t choose our morning workout, our breakfast, or our route to work. An algorithm would do that for us. Our jobs would no longer be secure and our privacy no longer private. As searches would become more thorough and facial recognition more efficient, AI will continue to erode peoples’ privacy. It will create a world where we can be manipulated in ways we do not appreciate.

Augmented reality might become the new ‘real’ and push reality to the back seat. And one day we might look back and think how barbaric it was to make this transition from real to digital.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay