Speech recognition, facial recognition, computers beating humans at games, recognise planets in space and holding an interview during a press conference. This is just a small list of the things AI’s are capable of at this very moment. But what will AI’s be able to do in the future? And more importantly, how will we enable AI to reach its full potential?
The overall research on AI has increased significantly since 2012 with almost 45.000 papers submitted to Arxiv Sanity Preserver, a browser to access the papers (Turck, 2018). The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems had a handful attendees in the 90s and 8.000 in 2017 (Zhang, 2018). Worldwide investment in AI will top 200$ billion in 2025 according to KPMG (Moore, 2018).
All these increases have enabled AI’s to help in well-known business processes. However some people still see some dark aspects of AI and question themselves if AI will takeover the workforce and some might even be afraid of AI. However, as most people do not know, AI is also here to make a social impact. Whether it is to reduce emission output, help hire and train the under privileged or help immigrants in the complex legal landscape (Forbes). AI is ready to even more, did you ever think about the idea that AI will help blind or deaf people to recognize danger or just to help with the every day life?
However to enhance the current knowledge of AI and enable a further growth, just putting billions of dollars into research might help but will not be enough. There needs to be a worldwide consensus and embracement of AI in order to reach its full potential (Turck, 2018). I believe that if we look at the social impact AI can make in all different kind of industries and social works, we will progress further as humanity as a whole.
References:
Turck, Matt (2018) Frontier AI: How far are we from artificial intelligence really? [Online] Hackernoon. Available at: https://hackernoon.com/frontier-ai-how-far-are-we-from-artificial-general-intelligence-really-5b13b1ebcd4e [Accessed 16-10-18]
Zhang, Chain (2017) A statistical tour of NIPS. [Online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/syncedreview/a-statistical-tour-of-nips-2017-438201fb6c8a [Accessed 16-10-18]
Moore, Mike (2018). Worldwide AI investment to top $200bn by 2025. [Online] Techradar. Available at: https://www.techradar.com/news/worldwide-ai-investment-to-top-dollar200bn-by-2025 [Accessed 16-10-18]
Polli, Frida (2018). AI for social impact. [Online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fridapolli/2018/01/30/ai-for-social-impact/#7e5d2998343d [Accessed 16-10-18]
Thanks Joep for your interesting article regarding Artificial Intelligence and all its applicabilities. It’s always very interesting to read about the variety of applications that AI is now finding its way in. What fascinates me as well is the fact that AI is increasingly beating human beings in a variety of tasks as you described. It is not unsurprising that many people also consider the dark side of AI such as the idea of replacing the workforce. However i think that is still a very unlikely situation. AI will have great capabilities of complementing jobs with their abilities, but entire workforce replacement is yet unthinkable. AI and machine learning systems are still far from perfect. Discovering and correcting errors for example remains difficult due to the fact that ML systems know more than they can tell, a phenomenon referred to as the reversed polyani’s paradox.
Hi Joep,
Very interesting article! I too, am really looking forward to the positive impact AI will have on our society. In order to get there, however, do you think a framework is needed to be set by governments and regulators in which the development of AI can somehow be steered and controlled? Or do you believe that companies should be free to develop, implement and use AI however they feel necessary? I am curious what you think about this matter, since I personally have a feeling that the companies that are developing AI might eventually get too much power over the application of AI…
Kind regards,
Justin