According to Elon Musk, in three to five years, we’ll most likely overcome most of the technical challenges for fully autonomous cars. Although it will take many more years to overcome the regulatory friction of getting those cars on the street, it is quite feasible that in terms of computational readiness, we’re only a handful of years away from having AI move us around on the streets.

Here I’d like to make a prediction, that before that,

AI will get involved in human mobility and migration.

Let me just disclose that my background is computer science and more specifically soft computing (inexact solutions to computationally hard problem often employing biomimetic algorithms and machine learning). I spent a large part of my graduate education writing AI code for a huge industrial robot in a windowless underground cellar in Tsinghua University in China and just playing around with evolutionary computation and neural networks at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. I’m not pretending to be an expert in the matter, merely disclosing my strong biases and sources of endless techno-optimism.

Before I get any further, let me also clarify that when I talk about AI, I do not mean artificial general intelligence or strong AI (some artificial super brain capable of human level intelligence moving us around like chess pieces), but applied or weak AI — computational agents that exhibit problem solving abilities in restricted domains that we typically assume require intelligence.

The notion of AI reorganizing humans came to me when I heard Sam Altman’s fascinating example that AI is already breeding humans. As crazy as it sounds, it is actually difficult to argue. Surely there are thousands of kids born to couples that found each other on internet dating sites and since often the matching algorithms on those sites are based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, then we effectively have

AI involved in the matter of whose DNA gets mixed.

Be it the fuzzy logic controller in you cars gearbox or the airlines scheduling algorithms — AI has been involved in moving people around for quite some time now. How many decisions do you think are made based on weather forecasts — who (or should I say what?) do you think makes those predictions?

Be it Siri, your Google search or your credit card transactions — most of us are ignorant to the touch-points of AI in our lives. Sam and Elon’s interview has helped me see how the symbiotic relationship between AI algorithms and mankind has already helped shape the last decade of our lives.

In 2006, I trained a simple feed-forward neural network that made predictions about expected call quality on Skype. That tiny little AI algorithm ended up in hundreds of millions of computers around the world, effectively getting AI involved in where your Skype calls get routed through over the peer to peer overlay network. I used to joke around that my secret agenda was to get all those neural networks connected to reach the magnitude of neuron connections in our brain and have Skype become self-aware in 2014.

Little did I know back then that in 2014, Jaan Tallinn, (one of the co-founders of Skype) will co-found CSER at the University of Cambridge to promote research into existential threats posed in part by AI.

Nerd jokes aside, my point here is that my poorly trained neural network was surely sub-optimal for parts of the network and hence AI was involved in who’s relationship survived and whose didn’t (network latency has significant impact into how strainful communications are).

What does this all have to do with human migration?

Today we’re building Teleport — software that helps people figure out where to live and how to get there. In short, it’s a dating site between people and locations.