Artificial Intelligence (AI) may bring to mind fantastic scenes from yesterday's sci-fi films. It is perhaps humankind's wonderful and unrestrained imagination, which has brought us to today's reality of extraordinary automation advancements in AI.
Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and author of the book titled 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution', says that already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translate or invest. "Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs, to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.
"Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.
"Shaping the fourth industrial revolution to ensure that it is empowering and human-centred, rather than divisive and dehumanising, is not a task for any single stakeholder or sector or for any one region, industry or culture. The fundamental and global nature of this revolution means it will affect and be influenced by all countries, economies, sectors and people."
CEO of AI-powered auditing platform, AppZen, Anant Kale highlights how AI creates a more satisfying customer service experience. He was recently published on PSFK: "The introduction of artificial intelligence systems will evolve how we perform work in the service sector. While some jobs will be eliminated, new jobs will spring up that place a premium on knowledge, expertise, and experience, rather than time-consuming repetitive tasks.
"Customer service agents replaced by AI-based chat bots will answer most customer questions - reducing the wasted time and frustration so common for customers today. Consumers using AI systems will find it tough to differentiate between interactions with real humans vs AI-based assistants.
"This AI-driven fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of our lives, but will ultimately lead to the same results as previous revolutions - increased productivity, efficiency, and new and smarter ways of doing work."
So is an AI algorithm the solution to all? "Even if an AI is learning, it still must be taught," says Lisa Michaud, data architect at Ocular's partner company Aspect Software.
"Supervised machine learning still entails a massive up-front effort preparing examples with human judgments from which to learn. Semi-supervised methods try to lessen this burden but introduce more risk of noise.
"Unsupervised methods rely on the machine's ability to make choices, possibly wrong ones, and to receive feedback after the fact in order to learn over time which choices are right and which are wrong. For reliable results, human expertise is always a part of the equation, and the future of AI probably lies with hybridised solutions - combining initial human effort and autonomous exploration - as the popularity of bootstrapping and semi-supervised methods shows."
The robots are certainly here. The question still for many industries however remains - what do we do with them?
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