Artificial intelligence has made tremendous progress over the last decades, moving from beating humans at games towards a wide range of fields. In 1999, IBM’s big blue defeated the world best Jeopardy champions, and 17 years later Google bested the world’s champion “go” player. Recently, Big Blue was employed to develop an antiviral to attack the Zika virus with great success. The new “macromolecule” was effective against not only Zika but multiple other viruses as well. LTP news estimates that “AI is going to change every endeavor of human activity from Medicine to Government to Manufacturing, Law, Finance and beyond. By 2025, AI Will Have a 5-Trillion-Dollar Direct Impact on the Workforce“.
Why is this important?
- AI replaces jobs, and platforms enable this: platforms act as the mediator between the AI and the user, and offer the interface and central place to ask for e.g. law advice.
- AI provides new services. This is especially the case for healthcare, where improved pattern recognition can detect tumors, or evolutionary algorithms can design new medicine. Add to this the possibility to turn code into biological products via synthetic biology, and the range of services expands.
- AI provides the boost that data analytics needed to make sense of the data collected and created via platforms. Platforms enable the recording of every transaction, which results in vast amounts of data, which can be useful also outside the interests of marketing.
Things to keep an eye on
The range of application areas of AI will expand, covering new industries, such as financial analytics, advising, insurance and law. Bank of America estimates the market for AI-based analytics to grow to 70 billion dollars by 2020. At the same time, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more ubiquitous; people use AI-based services everyday without realizing it. As a counter trend to the hype and excitement over the potential of AI, concern about its malevolent potential has also been raised, ranging from AI causing mass unemployment (most probable) to unleashing “a global propaganda war that sets governments and populations in opposition”.
The Finnish government recently released its action plan for enhancing the innovation ecosystem around intelligent robotics and automation in Finland, with a focus on security, privacy, user centricity and service design. Currently, the main innovation hub around AI and robotics in Finland is Airo island. A good example of a Finnish company applying AI is Zenrobotics, which makes recycling robots based on machine vision. The Finnish “Curious AI Company” is focusing on the development of advanced artificial intelligence and is now trying to apply its unsupervised machine learning to various pilot areas. Finns also take part in the discussion around AI, see for example the predictions on AI by Jarno M Koponen.
Selected articles and websites
A Government resolution to promote the development of intelligent robotics and automation
The next AI is no AI
AI and Communication: Machines That Can ‘Hear’ and ‘Understand’ Voices
Siri creators unveiled a new AI platform that seems to blow Siri out of the water
New Infosys AI tool could transform the way companies maintain complex systems
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
New AI security system cleverly combines machine learning and human intuition
DimensionalMechanics raises $4.7M for enterprise artificial intelligence platform