Will AI get smarter and more practical?

With 3b people set to go online in 2 years, expert says we are heading for more ambient future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has passed an inflection point that promises disruptive potential no less than the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford’s assembly line and the invention of flight and the internet, an industry expert has said.

Sam Blatteis, CEO of regional public policy advisory and research firm The Mena Catalysts, told Gulf News that AI is a catchy shorthand to be sure. Blatteis pointed out that some engineers now prefer the term “machine intelligence” which enables machines to learn from experience or examples. However, for lay purposes, they’re basically interchangeable — the science of making things smart.

“By ‘smart’, we don’t mean they’re generally intelligent/ conscious, like how a person is. We simply mean that it’s good at solving a particular type of problem. I think we’re heading toward a more ambient future. We still live in an age of clunky machines where if I want to cook something, I have to walk over to the stove, press the button, set the temperature and watch it,” he said.

Google Co-Founder and Alphabet’s CEO Larry Page is famous for outlining that, “I have always believed that technology should do the hard work — discovery, organisation, communication — and then get out of the way, so people can live their lives and do what makes them happiest, not messing around with annoying machines.”

“I think that’s about right. Planes fly, but don’t flap their wings, and we don’t pretend they are birds; it’s the same with smart machines. They are smart relative to the task at hand, but not in a human way. Machine learning is the technique at the heart of AI development,” Blatteis said.

Many believe that there may not be a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than AI.

AI revenue is expected grow from $643 million in 2016 to $70 billion in 2020 and is likely to bring billions of dollars in return on investment globally — on a shorter timescale.

When AI is used in the right way, he said, it can boost governments’ social-economic responsiveness to their citizenry, make government substantially more efficient, more citizen-friendly, and there’s a large range of strategic industries important to the Gulf governments that stand to benefit from AI — in health care, transportation, education, manufacturing, and infrastructure, to name just a few.

He said the digital economy surpassed $4 trillion in 2016 and it is growing 10 per cent per year, significantly faster than any developed economy and an order of magnitude larger than the global economy as a whole, which is logical.

“The world has gone from zero wireless devices to more than four billion and one-third of the world’s population is now on internet. An additional two to three billion people will come online in the next two years,” he said.