New-Tech Europe | February 2019

Biography Pieter Ballon Professor Pieter Ballon gained his master’s degree in Modern History from KU Leuven and his PhD in Communication Sciences at VUB. He has taught Communication Sciences at VUB since 2009. Since 2016, he has been director of SMIT, an imec research group at VUB focusing on ‘Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology’. Pieter Ballon was ap- pointed the first Brussels Smart City Ambassador and is also the Inter- national Secretary for the European Network of Living Labs. His publica- tions include the book “Smart Cities: how technology keeps our cities livable and makes them smarter”. Illustrations for article pieter ballon: in attach a picture that is ours. The other are from istock and one from MIT (request picture usage from norman project with Pinar Yanardag Delul pinary@mit.edu)

realizing it) in exchange for access to your data. With this system, data will become a new tradeable com- modity and so we will be able to ensure better that our data is our own property and that we can use it transparently when and where we want. How is imec working on this future? Imec is working on neuromorphic chips that are able to support com-plex algorithms efficiently and without consuming too much energy. Being economical is important when it comes to building AI into sen-sors. Imec is also involved in the ExaScience Life Lab to build super-computers for major medical problems (developing new medication, understanding diseases better, etc.). The imec research group SMIT set up the internal DANDA project to make AI more transparent en to make the algorithms understandable for different parties involved. Methods such as post-it data flow map- ping and a description of the data preparation process were developed for imec’s AI developers. Also, the DELICIOS project was launched in 2018. This four-year project will see researchers examining which com- plex tasks humans will be willing to transfer to autonomous systems and on what terms – as well as how comfortable they feel about it. Trusting these systems will be one of the central points in the study. A technology such as AI cannot be developed without taking account of the social and economic implications from the outset. For this reason, imec will be intensifying this multidisciplinary research in 2019. This article is part of a special edition of imec magazine. To mark imec’s 35th anniversary, we are creating a vision of how technology will shape our society in 2035.

systems. The well-known historian, Yu-val Harari, quotes the example of Google’s AlphaZero, which took less than 4 hours to learn how to play chess, after which it was able to beat the best human-trained chess computer. Not by learning from historical data, but by using machine learning to teach itself to play the game. This has gone so far now that when players in chess tournaments make a move that is strikingly creative and original, the judges may suspect that player is using a chess computer to come up with the moves. So, both routine jobs and jobs in which new possibilities have to be ex-plored can be carried out by AI systems. But will they ever be as crea-tive as we, humans? That remains to be seen. Whatever happens, the content of many jobs will be changed by the arrival of AI. We will work with these AI systems and have to keep ad- justing to new capabilities. Lifelong learning will be very important, both for low-skilled and highly qualified jobs. New types of job will also be created that we can’t predict at the moment. Typically, jobs where human contact is very important – such as nursing – will still be done by humans, even though robots may be brought in to provide assis- tance and support. But the impact goes further than just our job content and we will also find other economic models becoming involved in which we will work less and in which job, income and consumption will be separated out from one another. So perhaps you won’t have to work (fulltime) to re-ceive a full income – and maybe you won’t need a full income to pro- vide for your basic needs. Just look at the current digital economy of apps and digital services. You can use many services free of charge and sometimes (with or without you

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