Time Has Arrived for AI

After 50 years of frequent failure and narrow success, artificial intelligence (AI) is going mainstream. A confluence of trends—cloud computing, smart phones, expanded broadband capability, improved AI algorithms, plus the steady Moore’s Law expansion of raw processing power—is producing a vast acceleration in AI capability. Not only are AI’s individual subdisciplines—speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine learning, computer vision, etc.—improving, they are beginning to work in concert. We are, finally, starting to approach the subtlety of real human intelligence. In the process, we are moving from the merely good to the uncanny.

Within the next three to five years, you will be able to:

• Use virtual personal assistants (VPAs) to manage your business and social calendars. VPAs will effortlessly find the most convenient time for a four-person meeting next week or reserve you a 2 p.m. tee time at the club. They will know your social graph and habitual patterns and, increasingly, like any good executive assistant, make helpful suggestions. (“Do you want me to invite your accountant to this meeting?”)

• Text ahead to a descendant of today’s Roomba to “vacuum the downstairs” confident in the knowledge that it will be able recognize and avoid both the antique desk and the cat.

• Indulge your taste for robatayaki, barbeque typically served at family-owned Japanese restaurants where English proficiency is minimal. You’ll be able to locate the nearest such restaurant to your Osaka hotel, determine its hours of operation, and use your smartphone translator to order in serviceable Japanese.

• Ask search engines questions of fact and get definitive answers—not millions of blue links. Instead of mere keywords—say, “Ricky Henderson,” “league leader,” “walks,” and “stolen bases”—you’ll ask, “In what years did Ricky Henderson lead the American League in both walks and stolen bases?” (Answer: 1982, 1983, 1989, and 1998.)

Within the same period, changes to the IT competitive landscape will prove just as profound:

• Most new smartphone applications will have to be voice-enabled rather than thumb-typed. Customers will insist on the capability to search, text, e-mail, schedule, collaborate, and purchase just by talking to their phones.

• AI will emerge as the key differentiator in smartphone competition and with it, overall IT leadership.

To grasp the full magnitude of the tectonic shift underway requires some understanding of AI’s checkered past. Founded as a discipline in 1956, AI has engendered lofty hopes (“Within 20 years, computers will be able to do anything a man can do,” according to Herb Simon, one of the discipline’s four founders) and bitter disillusionment. Despite decades of intriguing laboratory demonstrations, AI usually fell well short of real-world reliability.

Take AI’s natural language understanding of a phrase such as “I want to drop off my car.” Does the speaker want to turn over parking of his car to a valet, push the car off a cliff, or perhaps injure yourself by falling off the car? A meaning easily grasped by most Americans has proven exasperatingly hard for AI to comprehend consistently. Better natural-language-understanding algorithms help, but the ultimate solution almost always comes down to hundreds of millions of iterations of speech patterns with almost as many individual English speakers. In AI, above all, what matters for real-world applicability is brute force computing power….
via: Gooptech