Digital nose    

In our first science class in grade school, we were taught that there are five senses. That we can hear with our ears, see with our eyes, smell with our noses, touch with our skin and taste with our tongue. That from each of these organs, our brain receives signals and interprets them to give us a sense or let us know of what’s happening around us. This is not just a monopoly of humans though. Same is also true with other animals on the planet. However, little did we know that several decades later, non-living things will have these senses too. We call it AI or artificial intelligence.

On hearing, who doesn’t know Siri? To those who don’t, this is the “first virtual personal assistant arising from decades of SRI research in AI.” This technology was developed through the “SRI-led Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project within DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, the largest-known AI project in U.S. History, and joint work with EPFL, the Swiss institute of technology.”

SRI spun off Siri, Inc. in 2007 and Apple acquired it in April 2010.  By October 2011, “Siri was unveiled as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S.”

Then, Alexa was born. To those who haven’t met her, Alexa is “Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on hundreds of millions of devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers.” Just like Siri, she can hear you well and interact clearly. As Amazon claimed, with Alexa, “you can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.”

Then came the Google Assistant.  As the name suggests, she is “an artificial intelligence–powered virtual assistant developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and smart home devices.” An upgrade of Google now, she can “engage in two-way conversations.” 

Apart from these three personal assistants, another breakthrough as far as hearing sense is concern is Replicant’s “autonomous call center.”  Its AI bot is touted to resolve simple issues over the phone. While intricate issues are routed to a human agent, it was said that “the bot employs deep learning to understand the intricacies of humans’ sentences and can fully resolve certain customer service inquiries.” 

Eyes for seeing? Nothing beats that of Elon Musk’s (the world’s richest) “Tesla Vision” computer vision system. Without a radar, he claimed that its “safety features are still proving to be at least as good as radar in a new independent test.” In fact, as far as its safety features are concerned, the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said that the “2021 Tesla Model 3’s new camera-based front crash prevention system rates superior for vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and advanced for pedestrian interactions.”

However, while it is true that AIs can now hear (like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant) and see (like Tesla Vision), they can’t smell. Well, not for long, thanks “to recent breakthroughs in so-called olfactory (relating to the sense of smell) tech” that are attracting a lot of venture capitalists and huge listed companies. Indeed, several startups and researches all over the globe are now developing “digital noses.” Reportedly, it “does everything from detecting bombs and health conditions to preserving food and brewing better beer.” 

For one, California-based Aromyx Corp. is said to develop a digital nose that “reacts in the presence of a variety of diseases, including pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and malaria.”  Montreal, Quebec-based Stratuscent, on the other hand, claimed to have an exclusive patent license (for its product named Noze) from NASA to develop “a first line of defense against the transmission of the coronavirus by air.”

Most impressive though is Tokyo-based Aroma Bit’s “low-cost, compact digital sensor that can detect pretty much anything that has a smell.”  It claimed “a wide range of applications, including the food, agriculture, daily commodities, industrial machinery, mobility, healthcare, robotics, mobile information service, home electronics, and IoT industries.”

Admittedly, AI bots or systems are already powerful today and are capable of improving quickly. It can surely surpass us in many aspects. If there is any consolation, it is the fact that we are human beings. That we are emotional beings. That AI bots or systems can’t replicate that.

Therefore, what we essentially need to do now is to recognize the strengths and limitations of both artificial intelligence and human intelligence and find ways to work together.  Otherwise, AI will render us, humans, irrelevant.