The capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) are no longer pie in the sky ideas and theories. They are a profound reality directly impacting markets, sectors and industries. Take China's Tencent, for example, which is one of four companies supported by the Chinese government to develop AI.
Tencent is a social media giant with more than a billion people using its instant messenger and 632 million monthly user accounts on its social networking platform, Qzone (the equivalent of Facebook and reportedly worth more than the troubled US company).
Tencent has fingers in the now traditional range of pies baked by the world's top digital businesses. Those pies range from AI to gaming, digital assistants, mobile payments, cloud storage, live streaming, education, movies and e-sports. Soon there will be more too because the company has stated its intention to put AI into everything.
Tencent is among those companies leading global AI development thanks at least in part to massive backing from the Chinese government. The business has the budget to hire the top experts in the field. It employs about 50 scientists and 200 software engineers focused on AI. But it's just one example.
From the mixed bag of discussions around the ethics of developing AI and how that may impact humanity and the human race, to the more purely positive aspects of helping humans do what humans do best (think creatively) AI is dominating a lot more of people's mindshare. It's the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
Far from replacing people, AI is really finding traction right now in helping people do the jobs they've always done.
Hanson Robotics created Sophia, which is the first robot to ever get citizenship (in Saudi Arabia); Baidu (China's Google) is using AI to help businesses use big data for real world problems through intelligent cloud; Tesla is using AI to improve self-driving cars; Google made AutoML, which is an AI to make AIs (to overcome the AI skills shortage); graphics card manufacturer Nvidia is making mobile AI processing brains for AI on the move; two Facebook chatbots recently bent English to their will by making their own language to talk to one another more efficiently (and Facebook subsequently shut them down because nobody could understand what they were saying); Microsoft wants AI everywhere for business from Azure to the edge; and there's IBM's Watson AI platform that is similar to Microsoft and moving in a multitude of directions that right now support people's roles in business.
AI is definitely going places but it's not quite there yet. And far from replacing people, which is one of the biggest fears workers have today, AI is really finding traction right now in helping people do the jobs they've always done.
Yet AI is really good at some stuff and really dumb at other stuff. For example, AIs have learned to identify images and pieces of images. This is significant because computers have always been pretty bad at it. But today they can pick out a camouflaged cat in a picture. It's part of the broader field of image recognition that has extensive commercial applications, everything from scanning faces at border control points, searching out wanted people and those of interest, to biometric access control in businesses, mapping geological faults, enriching military mission planning, recognising ripe fruits, and so many more applications.
The real benefit is that machines can do that and other tasks a lot faster than people can and sometimes a lot more accurately. Powerful AI-enriched platforms, for example, can scan thousands of faces a minute. It's a job traditionally done by people, just not so fast nor so accurately. That's extremely useful in so many ways. Mass transit, retail and event attendance, for example, without causing people to pause to pay at turnstiles, tills and other points is a massive win. The same technology can be used at companies where many employees and visitors regularly access a site.
Border control processes can be a lot simpler too if people don't have to all stop to have their identifying passports examined. There are definitely privacy concerns but there are also many potential benefits when they're handled adequately.
AI today, at this germinal phase in its development, is enriching people's lives and opening up a rich tapestry of opportunities based on creative application.
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