Is AI Taking Over the World? Not Quite—But Definitely North Idaho
Movies and television shows over the decades have depicted what artificial intelligence will look like in the future. While Asimov’s iRobot and Cameron’s Terminator depict terrifying possibilities, fantasy is not reality. However, the future is here and it’s happening in North Idaho, a surprisingly vibrant hub for tech companies. From the robot powered by the University of Idaho roaming Coeur d'Alene Lake to companies developing AI software for everyday problems, this area is becoming known for its tech industry. Perhaps most notably is the fact that Coeur d'Alene was the first city in the world to pass an ordinance to allow the public free use of robots on public property with the same rights as human beings.
One company working with artificial intelligence and the future of tech in North Idaho is CK Collab, or CKC. Founder and Coeur d'Alene local Eric Carmichael shares his experience working in tech when he founded the company with his family back in 2011.
“CKC is a custom software boutique focused on hiring underdogs then developing them into craftsmen engineers,” Eric explains. “We pride ourselves in doing more than our ‘fair share’ for our clients.”
Carmichael was washing dishes in college when his mother got in a severe motorcycle accident, experiencing permanent brain damage resulting from a coma. She was in need of round the clock care so he moved home to provide for her.
“I decided to try and leverage my coding skills to be able to provide care from home,” Eric shares. “I have been coding since I was 8 years old. I wrote robots for Diablo 2 and made a worm infecting the Virtual Stock Exchange in highschool. I bought some books on web development, read tons of tutorials and started working on improving my web development skills. Eventually I found Python and Django and grew into a ‘craftsman developer.’”
The process was personal and Carmichael had everything to lose.
“Over about a year and a half I made dozens of small projects, worked night after night, helped care for my mom and acquired the thousands of small bits of knowledge I would need to compete with college graduates for development work. We landed on "Carmichael Kid's Collaboration" because my sister and I were starting the company; she would do design and I would do code.”
CKC consists of nine local team members, from Founder and Lead Engineer Eric Carmichael and his brother, Allen, who manages marketing, to Senior Software Engineer Bailey Trefts and his team, Harvey Hartwell, Logan Ruf, Nic Trefts, and Sam Wood to designer Wade Lutz and game developer Tobias Phelps.
The family owned business has grown over the years and has a full roster of clientele, locally and internationally, including a collaboration between University of Paris, Barcelona, Stanford and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
“Our work is pretty eccentric,” Eric states matter-of-fairly. “We work on machine learning competition platforms, skydiving simulators and healthcare B2B software. Mostly we do custom web applications for small to medium sized organizations. Good engineering is great craftsmanship,” Eric continues. “Our software engineers are special. They care just that little extra bit about annoying details many other engineers overlook. Instead of writing the code and making sure it works, we write code that checks itself! How crazy is it that software folks can actually write code that checks their work and most developers don't do it!”
And their work speaks for itself. Right now the team is working with Trailhead Analytics, a Silicon Valley company focused on using the power of AI to drastically improve complex engineering work. They are building software that removes all the current barriers between engineers and cutting edge iterative design– exorbitant licenses, steep learning curves, and intense computing requirements.
Logan Ruf, a CKC software engineer, breaks down the tech. "Trailhead helps you see through this big cloud of information to the right stuff for your experiments or research.”
When it comes to the future of everything the company works on these techpreneurs have some thoughts.
“I think we're at a weird place with exponential growth,” Eric postulates. “Like with Bitcoin, we're at the beginning of the S curve and things are going to get a bit crazy. Twenty years ago an iPhone would be hard to imagine. Twenty years from now, what will we see that we can't imagine now? One prediction I have is massive improvements in healthcare via CRISPR and MSC stem cells.”
“I don't think AI will take over the world because I think we are going to meld together with computers when NeuraLink is up and running,” Allen adds. “NeuraLink is very basically a chip that goes into your brain and will connect you with the internet. We will all be AI in the future but AI is a consciousness in computers that we’ll be able to learn and think for itself.”
“Imagine you have a switchboard that you can give a single handwritten digit, and it will output a number between 0 and 9,” Logan elaborates. “This switchboard has tens of thousands of knobs that affect the output when you give it a written number. There is a possible combination- you could turn all these knobs so that the switchboard would correctly identify the number every time. It would be impossible for a human to do this, but if you teach a computer to do it, then it's an AI.”
Whether the world is headed for full blown digital transhumanism or not, there is no question that the exponential growth of technology is only going to be more integrated into everyday life. Regardless, it looks like Coeur d'Alene is the place to be.
