Artificial Intelligence: There's No Stopping It

The current thought is that AI will either revolutionize every industry or become smarter than people and drive us out of existence. 

The real answer is no one knows, but we do know that AI is affecting us. Language processing, speech and facial recognition, self-driving cars, and evolving machine intelligence are but several of the ways AI is impacting human society.

In current usage, AI refers to either a computer that can learn from experience and improve its performance over time, or a computer that can recognize voice and other 'natural' human inputs and respond in a useful way.

Products, such as ECHO and Alexa are already acclimating consumers to interacting in a familiar way with very powerful, evolving machine intelligence.  For example, your ECHO knows that every morning at 6am you wake and turn on a light. That habit can be replicated  by ECHO and automatically be done each morning.  It's all about perfecting the experience and baking-in that intelligence and creating systems that will know what users want and when they want it.

Another area in development is what is termed 'reaction aware' or emotion-sensing AI systems which use up to 40 billion data points combined with deep machine learning and advanced computer vision technologies to sense and analyze feeling.

Powerful AI, like I have been discussing, is very expensive to develop and deploy, requiring huge amounts of coding, powerful processors, and very high bandwidth to make work. So, for now, the best AI goes into cars, smartphones, banking, healthcare, and digital signage. A limiting factor to AI's growth is the tremendous amount of data that systems must gather and process in order to develop deep intelligence about the real world.  However, in time this impediment will be overcome.

AI's immersive, man/machine collaborative environment might seem uncomfortable but it will shape our future.  Robotic factories are already making better robots for manufacturing cars. Future AI will surely impact humanity in ways that we can not imagine. In the best case scenario AI will contribute to a win-win world, but don't be so sure.

Jim Lavorato