AI is the future
If it feels like the future of AI is a rapidly changing landscape, that’s because the present innovations in the field of artificial intelligence are accelerating at such a blazing-fast pace .
Indeed, artificial intelligence is shaping the future of humanity across nearly every industry. It is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT — not to mention generative AI, with tools like ChatGPT and AI art generators garnering mainstream attention — and it will continue to act as a technological innovator for the foreseeable future.
Roughly 44 percent of companies are looking to make serious investments in AI and integrate it into their businesses. And of the 9,130 patents received by IBM inventors in 2021, 2,300 were AI-related.
The Evolution of AI
AI’s influence on technology is due in part because of how it impacts computing. Through AI, computers have the ability to harness massive amounts of data and use their learned intelligence to make optimal decisions and discoveries in fractions of the time that it would take humans.
AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester.
Since then, AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech, technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization. With innovations like these, AI has re-taken center stage like never before — and it won’t cede the spotlight anytime soon.
What Industries Will AI Change?
There’s virtually no major industry that modern AI — more specifically, “narrow AI,” which performs objective functions using data-trained models and often falls into the categories of deep learning or machine learning — hasn’t already affected. That’s especially true in the past few years, as data collection and analysis has ramped up considerably thanks to robust IoT connectivity, the proliferation of connected devices and ever-speedier computer processing.
“I think anybody making assumptions about the capabilities of intelligent software capping out at some point are mistaken,” David Vandegrift, CTO and co-founder of the customer relationship management firm 4Degrees, said.
With companies spending billions of dollars on AI products and services annually, tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon spending billions to create those products and services, universities making AI a more prominent part of their curricula and the U.S. Department of Defense upping its AI game, big things are bound to happen.
“Lots of industries go through this pattern of winter, winter, and then an eternal spring,” former Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told ZDNet. “We may be in the eternal spring of AI.”
Some sectors are at the start of their AI journey, others are veteran travelers. Both have a long way to go. Regardless, the impact AI is having on our present day lives is hard to ignore.