How much of our lives will be changed by artificial intelligence? According to a new report, by 2030, large urban cities will be transformed as self-driving cars, package-delivering robots and surveillance drones become a common phenomenon of the streets.
Produced by an international panel of artificial intelligence experts, convened by Stanford University, the report takes an in-depth look at how artificial intelligence is already impacting society, and how it will continuously evolve over the next 14 years.
“Until now, most of what is known about AI comes from science fiction books and movies,” said Peter Stone, a computer science professor at the University of Texas who chaired the panel that produced the report. “This study provides a realistic foundation to discuss how AI technologies are likely to affect society.”
One of the challenges that people fear will come with the mainstreaming of AI is the loss of many manual jobs. However, the report’s authors assure us, “ in many realms, AI will likely replace tasks rather than jobs in the near term, and will also create new kinds of jobs…But the new jobs that will emerge are harder to imagine in advance than the existing jobs that will likely be lost.”
The authors of the report explain that Artificial Intelligence, as an umbrella term, is difficult to define. In Hollywood movies and most sci-fi novels, artificial intelligence is usually portrayed as self-aware robots. “I think the first thing to understand is that AI is not a thing,” Stone states. “That’s an important part of this report.”
The reality is that artificial intelligence is a nuanced technology that is already woven into our daily lives- to the extant that most of us give it little thought.
For example, computer “vision”, a kind of this technology that drives the type of video games that give players simulated experiences that appear to mirror the real world, is considered AI. AI is also the kind of technology known as “deep learning”, which enables Siri and other programs to understand what we are saying and respond to us.
The government continues to fund research and AI related innovations. How these technologies will affect us all is a mystery that only time can answer.
