Glimpsing into the Future: Artificial Intelligence

As I officially begin my 4th decade today, it is more than appropriate that after having looked at broad trends facing us, we now envision the technologies that will shape our future.

Advancements in technology are accelerating and creating new opportunities — while also generating new debates and challenges. It will be important to ensure that technology doesn’t divide people into a winners-take-it-all camp and a losers camp.

Throughout practically all of humanity’s history, technology has been an enabler, but more than ever, right now it is shaping the world as we know it. That’s because of three key facts:

1. Computer processing power (CPU, RAM, or storage) has never been so vast and so cheap: it’s literally becoming affordable for almost everyone on the planet. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba or Digital Ocean have deployed clouds worldwide. The availability of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is still growing rapidly.
2. Internet is now a true platform that has initiated the digital transformation: everything is (or is becoming) digital. Data is collected like never before, at an unprecedented pace.
3. A new generation of digital natives that have never experienced a world without mobile phones or internet is entering the workforce today. They are challenging the business processes and the internal structures that still rely on a set of pre-defined roles and tasks.

A glimpse into the future

Renowned futurist and scientist Ray Kurzweil has made several predictions that turned out to be true. Recently, he summarised his predictions for the next 40 years as follows:

• 2010s: Ten Terabytes of computing power will cost as little as $1,000
• 2020s: Nanobots will become smarter, self-driving cars will start to dominate roads
• 2030s: Virtual Reality (VR) will feel 100% real
• 2040s: Non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than humans

You can find more of his fascinating predictions here.

Another way of glimpsing into the future is to look at prognostications of how various technologies will transform the way that we live. According to a 2013 report by consulting firm McKinsey, the top six disruptive technologies in 2025, with an expected global economic impact of US$15 trillion to US$36 trillion, will be:

• Mobile Internet
• Automation of knowledge work
• Internet of Things
• Cloud Technology
• Advanced Robotics
• Autonomous and Near-Autonomous vehicles

In coming articles in this series, I will explore various technological trends and look at what their impact will be. But let’s start with the biggest of them all, which impacts on all of the technologies in McKinsey’s list: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Artificial Intelligence

AI has hit the mainstream media and captured public attention: newspapers are talking about it almost everyday. However, the term “AI” is problematic because it is used far too broadly, referring to far too many things. “Artificial Intelligence” is not the best or most accurate term to capture many of the changes that this technology offers.

In a nutshell, AI is basically the ability for a machine to perform cognitive functions that we associate with human minds such as perception, reasoning, learning, interaction with the environment, problem-solving, and even exercising creativity.

AI is both a platform and a combination of technologies that will drive our lives to be more productive, more creative and perhaps more controlled. AI technologies are today enabling robotics, autonomous vehicles, computer vision, language recognition, virtual agents and more.

From a pure technology and algorithmic perspective, Artificial Intelligence can be split into 3 categories:

• Behavioural Methods and Statistical Methods: how to interpret your data, it is widely used in marketing for instance.
• Machine Learning: how to find patterns in your data and understand the right models fitting your data. It is now used in almost every sector and helps to detect cancer, suggest new products to buy or movies to watch
• Deep Learning: the now famous Neural Networks used famously in applications like Siri, Alexa or for Image recognition

As the picture below illustrates, even though AI stories hit the headlines almost every single day, we are just at the beginning of the AI revolution. Companies and States (France, US and China clearly understanding the importance of the field) are investing massively but adoption is still low.

Source: Artificial Intelligence: The Next Digital Frontier, McKinsey Global, June 2017.

That being said, the first real world use cases are starting to be documented. In the Financial Services sector, it is foreseen that AI-optimized fraud detection systems will be a $3 billion market in 2020, according to McKinsey.

Amazon has reduced the “Click to Ship” cycle time from 60–75 minutes to just 15 minutes thanks to its Kiva robots and Netflix has improved the personalised recommendations to its 100 million subscribers worldwide keeping customers happy and reducing cancellations.

All sectors will be transformed by AI:

Today, most AI use cases are confined to well-scoped purposes; they all demonstrate the goal of being able to act autonomously and follow a process: Understand, Learn, Predict and Adapt. The possibility of AI being used to allow ‘machines’ to become autonomous will bring new challenges and the need to create standards, norms and define how far we want to go.

Of course, AI isn’t happening in isolation. The rapid evolution of Data Science, the emergence of Model Driven platforms giving access to algorithms (see Amazon, Google and Microsoft) and the shift from data driven architectures to event driven architectures will foster the rise of robotics, smart assistants as well as smart machines — which will be detailed in the next article.

As a direct consequence, I will heavily focus on AI in the coming years and dig deeper on its use cases and impact on the world. Feel free to share in the comments the projects you are working on and how you perceive the changes linked to technology and AI.

Also in this series:

Earlier, I outlined how we are living in a very polarized world, and asked what our future will look like — and and how we could organise ourselves to find solutions through collaboration.