As a mage, I just want to pursue the truth

Chapter 358 Holy Grail
There was an article in the "Land and Public Governance Quarterly" in Singapore:
《Lion City Digital Government Plan Promotes Practice》

One of the authors of this article was Lin Xianwen, who was then the Section Chief of the Control and Assessment Department of the Singapore National Development Council.

It clearly states that the National Development Council will use information technology to improve the efficiency and quality of government services from 2017 to 2020.

In order to make government management smarter, implement evidence-based governance and optimize decision-making quality, the National Development Council is also developing a government program database and case program space management information system in phases.

Merlin's arrival directly helped them achieve a leap forward.

Artificial intelligence directly replaces everyone's job.

In 2017, the year after this article was published, the Singapore government proposed a plan to provide information technology skills training for civil servants every year.

This plan was promoted by the Ministry of Science and Technology headed by Li Hongyi.

It was also for this reason that Lin Xianwen later successfully joined Li Hongyi and became one of his core backbones.

Sometimes writing articles is a good way to find someone to lean on, especially in countries influenced by Confucian culture.

Lin Xianwen felt uneasy when he found out that he was given a month's vacation. When he found out that everyone else was given the vacation, he knew that he was doomed.

Especially when he went to a government agency to do business the next day, artificial intelligence helped him get it done.

The entire process only requires you to clearly express your needs through voice or text, and then artificial intelligence will help you get things done.

Will Lion City still need so many civil servants in the future?
No matter how much the quality of civil servants is improved, can they provide better services than artificial intelligence?
This goes without saying, but is it possible to overturn Merlin's decision?

Lin Xianwen felt that his future was bleak.

He finally understood what Merlin meant when he said employment is welfare during his inaugural speech.

Middle-aged men are the most miserable after losing their jobs. They have elderly parents to support and children who are not yet independent to raise.

Fortunately, Lion City’s welfare security is relatively complete, with relatively complete mechanisms for the elderly from medical care to pensions.

But if he is laid off by the Lion City government, at least the quality of his children's education cannot be guaranteed.

Don’t even think about sending your children to study abroad at prestigious universities in Europe and the United States after they become adults.

As for the scholarship provided by the Lion City government, this path is not something that his son, who has mediocre academic performance and learning talent, can achieve.

Lin Xianwen listened to the entire text of Merlin’s inaugural speech the day before in front of the TV.

He was still thinking about what industry Merlin's first fire would burn into.

Because Merlin mentioned that some industries will be disrupted and entire industries will be wiped out.

I never expected that I would be the first one to be killed.

He called Li Hongyi overnight, trying to get some information:
"Minister Lee, if Singapore adopts artificial intelligence to replace government functions in the future, how will we be arranged?"

After the normal greetings, he asked directly. Li Hongyi still had an impression of this subordinate. After all, they had worked together for so many years:

“I don’t know, my father has completed the transfer of power, and to avoid suspicion, I have already submitted my resignation to the current government.

My resignation has been approved, but I don’t know what will happen next.

I can only give you one piece of advice, that is, don't act rashly and wait for Mr. Merlin's arrangements."

After saying this, Li Hongyi hung up the phone.

I am about to take up a position at Sinovation Biotech. Does the situation in Singapore have anything to do with me?

Li Miaomiao did not agree to give Li Hongyi an executive position, and only gave him a position as the head of a product manager line.

If he has the ability to do it on his own, they won't set any restrictions.

In fact, many times, the strength of your relationship is reflected in whether you can turn it into reality.

For example, in China, section-level cadres in public institutions can be directly transferred to administrative agencies and become civil servants while retaining their rank.

It is possible according to the system, but only a few can turn it into reality.

The promise made by Li Miaomiao is possible, but as to whether Li Hongyi can turn it into reality, it depends on whether his father is cooperative enough.

Li Hongyi was obviously reminded of this by Li Xianlong, so when he spoke to the outside world, he always told them not to cause trouble and to be obedient.

The civil service team in Singapore is a very large group, and they cannot accept the reality that they are about to lose their jobs after finding out.

They instantly connected together and tried to take to the streets to put pressure on Merlin.

The majority are lower-level civil servants.

But for Singaporeans, the AI ​​process is much better than before, both in terms of efficiency and experience.

Therefore, this movement cannot gain the support of the majority of Singaporeans.

If they like to sit, then let them sit outside, since it's holiday now.

The current situation in Lion City was broadcast live by major media around the world.

In China, it was only briefly mentioned.

"Unrest broke out in Lion City, with many civil servants taking to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the new leader, Merlin."

As for why I am dissatisfied, there is no reason behind it.

In this era of globalization, it is extremely easy to obtain information.

Judging from the artificial intelligence used in Lion City, it can already completely replace low-end human jobs.

Positions like various customer service, telephone sales, pre-sales managers, etc., which do not require face-to-face communication, can all be eliminated.

More than half of them had been killed by the artificial intelligence developed by Blue Star itself, and now the remaining ones can also become part of the long river of history.

At the same time, low-end and even all service jobs, such as government civil servants, may also disappear.

Artificial intelligence performs so well in this area, but what about other areas?

How much potential can the technology behind an artificial intelligence that has clearly passed the Turing test and is clearly far superior to the basic work capabilities of ordinary people have?
This is a question that all practitioners in the artificial intelligence industry are very curious about.

The question about Singapore government service-oriented artificial intelligence on Quora is the most popular question in the computer section recently.

“What is the level of service-oriented artificial intelligence in Singapore? What are the specific technical principles behind it?”

“The artificial intelligence technology that Merlin has recently used in Lion City can easily pass not only the earliest definition of the Turing test, but even the latest enhanced Turing test.

At the same time, in the field of speech recognition, no matter which language of Blue Star I use to communicate with it, it can perfectly understand what you mean.

I am a PhD in computer science from the National University of Singapore, and I can speak Chinese, English and Cantonese.

At the same time, I have classmates from all over the world around me, some of whom can speak French, German, Spanish, etc.

We chatted with the artificial intelligence directly online, and language was not a barrier for him at all.

If the speech recognition capability of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Corrana was 10 ten years ago, the current speech recognition capability is 15.

Lion City’s artificial intelligence is at least 100 in speech recognition alone.

You should know that traditional speech recognition mainly converts analog audio into digital signals. For a computer to decipher the signal, it must have a digital database or vocabulary, words or syllables.

These data are then quickly compared to the signal.

We typically store speech patterns on the hard drive and load them into memory when the program runs.

These stored patterns are then checked against the output of the A/D converter by a comparator.

Therefore, speech recognition is related to both hardware and software.

Although people have applied artificial intelligence technology to speech recognition in the past fifteen years, the underlying logic has not changed.

At most, you can use your usage records and voice to adjust the database to simulate the corresponding relationship.

I seriously doubt that the underlying logic of Lion City’s artificial intelligence is different from Blue Star’s traditional speech recognition.

As for the specific underlying logic, if I knew it, I would have to be my supervisor's mentor and he would be my doctoral student.

Because Singapore’s artificial intelligence involves the entire city’s six million permanent population.

Artificial intelligence has just come online, and people’s curiosity about it is at its peak.

At the same time, with such a huge amount of concurrency, I have not seen any reports of errors in the local community in Singapore.

You should know that you can use Apple's Siri even when you are disconnected from the Internet, because it is a software embedded in the Apple system.

It uses the underlying principle I just mentioned above.

In fact, it cannot recognize any problem that is slightly more complicated.

It can only recognize fixed-pattern needs and standardized spoken language.

Lion City’s artificial intelligence is different. It identified at least one million questions in one day.

More importantly, there was no error, which was amazing.

A failure rate of 0 and a failure rate of 0.01% are completely different concepts.

The voice recognition technology alone is worth at least 100 billion US dollars.

(The market size of voice recognition in 2021 is 107 billion yuan)
Because voice recognition can be used in all fields including mobile phones, home appliances, and automobiles.

Can you imagine a navigation system that can perfectly recognize your requirements? No matter what you want to eat, it can help you find the most suitable place.

Dig deeper and embed some advertising algorithms into it, for example, if you want to eat a hamburger, then it will tell you your taste preferences.

The navigation automatically takes you to a burger restaurant where you have recharged your account.

You can't put the blame on AI companies or AI itself.

Of course I believe Merlin's artificial intelligence will not be used for this purpose.

However, if other Internet companies can thoroughly study the underlying logic of Merlin's artificial intelligence, I think the time will not be long before they can do the same.

Unlabel's CEO hailed translation as the holy grail of artificial intelligence.

This statement is supported by many big names in the field of artificial intelligence.

why?
In the Old Testament of the Bible, there is a story about how people used the same language in the early days and tried to build the Tower of Babel to reach heaven. God overturned the Tower of Babel and then made different civilizations use different languages.

This caused the inability for humans to communicate.

This story is very influential in the Bible. A similar myth about the collapse of the Tower of Babel also appears in the collapse of Mount Buzhou in the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

Also in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Mount Buzhou is the only path to heaven.

Such highly similar myths and legends make people wonder whether such a road to heaven really existed in ancient times.

Back to machine translation, this involves a lot of text content, and the models from one language to another are different.

This is the case in Bluestar's machine translation technology.

If translation between multiple languages ​​is involved, thousands of models will be generated, with excessive computational complexity.

In recent years, the artificial intelligence community has been looking for a multilingual model.

A multilingual model is used to construct text representations that are common to all languages.

It can be roughly understood that no matter what language it is, you can find a meaning that is independent of the language.

Such a model was first developed in 2021 by the team of Phiipp Koehn, a leader in machine translation.

For the first time, multilingual models outperform bilingual models.

Ten years have passed since then, and Phiipp Koehn's team has made far less progress on multilingual models than expected.

Their team fell apart and was reorganized several times because progress was not as good as expected.

To this day, the largest application scenario of multilingual models within META is in detecting hate speech.

That is to say, among different languages, it is easy to find language-independent meanings in languages ​​related to the emotional element of hatred.

But other emotional elements have not found a breakthrough.

You should know that Phiipp Koehn's team is backed by META and has 20 billion data training sessions every day.

I don't believe Merlin's AI has that much data to train on.

The result is that it is comparable to professional translators in the field of intelligent translation.

It is very adept at recognizing different languages.

I guess Merlin has its own approach in the field of artificial intelligence, with a dedicated compiler language.

I hope that Merlin will be able to make the relevant knowledge public during my lifetime.

This should be the biggest dream of all people working in the field of artificial intelligence.

You can see research results that are at least fifty years ahead of current technology.

I can roughly understand the feeling of the ancient Chinese people who were willing to die in the evening after hearing the truth in the morning. "

The above answer was given by a Chinese student studying in Singapore.

Basically all the branches of major Internet companies in Singapore have sent their employees to test the artificial intelligence used by the Singapore government.

The headquarters of major Internet companies such as Tencent, Xiaomi, ByteDance, Apple, and Amazon are still waiting for the test reports from the Lion City branch.

Companies like Microsoft, whose Asia-Pacific headquarters is in Lion City, can mobilize more talent resources to make judgments on the Lion City government's artificial intelligence.

Thanks to Changqing1040 and I Love Shinji for their rewards.

I have something to do tomorrow, so I probably won’t be able to update.

So I released this chapter in advance.

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(End of this chapter)