He can read lips and create new food recipes. He can beat anyone at chess and go. Every major tech company tries to integrate it into their organization and business. And it seems that every new app feels it is its duty to claim that it uses machine learning in one way or another to make your life better. Artificial intelligence can be called without exaggeration the most discussed topic of the outgoing year. The revolution is near, and the most obvious question we must ask ourselves is: what's next?
This question was asked to answer by James Hendler, director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data and Application Research and one of the developers of the Semantic Web. The problem, according to Handler, is that many people see AI as a kind of "Terminator" or utopian dream, completely excluding humanity from the equation.
“People want to paint this technology in white and black,” he explains. "But humans do best with shades of gray."
And before moving on to speculations about the future of artificial intelligence, Handler issues a slightly political slogan: we humans and AI are strong together.
AI package for mass programming
“In the short term, I think what I admire most about AI is how easy it has become for programmers to use it. This is no longer the domain of specialists,”says Hendler.
The classes he currently teaches on AI cognitive computing illustrate this point. Undergraduates are doing projects like chatbots that can answer questions about the Harry Potter universe in a few weeks. A few years ago, such a feat would have been a topic for a Ph. D. thesis.
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What changed?
You no longer need to build deep learning, computer vision, or natural language components from scratch. Just download the open source package and integrate it into your system with a few tweaks. It's like playing with WordPress, although Handler prefers to talk about the early days of the internet. In the early 1990s, with a little understanding of HTML, it was possible to build a website by installing some kind of pre-packaged code.
“The artificial intelligence has been packaged in a usable way,” says Hendler. "You just have to piece it together and make it work without doing basic research into what these components are."
Open doors for innovation
In the short term, Hendler says, this opens up the game to players of all stripes.
“We're seeing a bunch of innovations in small companies that use existing techniques for deep learning, vision and language processing,” he says. "The heavyweights - Microsoft, Google, Facebook - will invest heavily in this technology, but in new directions."
Meanwhile, academia and government continue to study the evolution of AI-related technologies. Hendler cites the example of self-driving transportation pioneered by universities like Stanford to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. Then Google refined this technology. Today, it seems like every car company on the planet is putting self-driving cars on the road.
While there remains a need to develop new artificial intelligence technologies to solve problems, Handler says that in the near term, the focus will be on the different kinds of business cases that can be done using existing tools.
“I think this kind of innovation attracts entrepreneurs and startups. There will be a lot of them,”says Handler.
Solving the problems of developed and developing countries
What can the average technology user gain from AI in 2017 and beyond? In this case, "more" means "less" because this technology works invisibly in the background. It will not be obvious so that you can buy it and see the whole world in a different light.
Take Siri, Apple's ubiquitous virtual assistant. Siri's competence for more complex tasks is constantly improving, but it still (and often) by default refers to web searches. But one day, in the near future, someone asks Siri or its equivalent to "show a picture of the kids from lunch today" - and the machine will quickly and accurately produce the result.
In fact, a number of startups can already boast of this kind of achievement. Snips is using an AI technique called "context aware" to create a kind of memory on the user's mobile device by looping through contacts, mail, calendar, photos and more. The system learns what is important to the user in his life, acting as a single portal for all applications and information stored on the device.
“The point here is for artificial intelligence to make technology disappear so that it doesn't bother you anymore,” says Rand Hindi, CEO and founder of Snips.
Of course, this is all a problem for developed countries - for technology to disappear. But Handler believes there will be projects in the near future that will improve conditions in developing countries. In particular, he and others are working with IBM to bring literacy to a billion people over the next five years.
“We may be able to make a significant difference in the lives of a huge number of people, especially in countries where literacy rates are currently low. This is where people will suddenly see how technology is changing their lives like never before."
Inevitably, along with the development of artificial intelligence, our world will face upheavals and, perhaps, even strikes. For example, truck drivers who may be unemployed due to the proliferation of self-driving vehicles. But at the same time, a lot of jobs will appear and, perhaps, the same people will be able to receive income not lower, and maybe higher than the previous level.
ILYA KHEL