Massive Opportunity

Artificial Intelligence is the single most important technology in my opinion we’re developing not only in this decade but in the 21st century. Once we realize a level of AI, known as strong AI, it will bring forth a revolution and exponential growth in all scientific and engineering fields, accelerating progress faster than ever before.

A lot of people are confused on what AI actually is. Most thinking that it is a digital brain in a thinking computer imitating what we do. Which is not exactly true, it is not a brain, it is not thinking (yet), and does not imitate everything we do. At a broad level current AI is the ability of a computer to process a vast amount of information for you, make decisions, and take appropriate action.

Strong AI

More specifically we are surrounded by what is known as weak AI – simple rule, probabilistic, or statistical based algorithms that can solve various problems from classification to clustering. These problem solving methods are then applied to almost every information technology we have from security, social media management, video games, face recognition, etc. You may know popular versions of AI such as Siri on your iPhone, or IBM’s Watson which won Jeopardy in 2011.

As a field AI has been around for 60 years, and is simply the collection of other fields such as mathematical optimization, statistical inference, stochastic calculus, theory of computation, game theory, etc. In this period of the last half century AI has always been romanticized as a technology that can match our intellectual output. Sadly it did not, but for the first time thanks to increasing computational power in computers, the vision of AI – to create strong AI, is actually realizable in the coming decades.

Strong AI is the capability for an AI to do anything we can all in one system. This is not an AI with human type thinking with emotions and goals to survive, that is in my opinion a foolish idea and gets into the debate of the unfriendly AI problem which I’ll tackle in another post. Instead strong AI is the ability to solve any kind of problem by communicating, understanding, planing, reasoning, taking actions and learning. There are many examples of such an AI from movies such as JARVIS from Iron Man.

Informational Power

There is a lot of talk from Elon Musk to Prof. Hawking on the threat of AI. And there is validity to the risks of AI but there is also massive opportunity which I believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Simply put AI will level the global playing field. Today, search engines gives a teenager with a smartphone in Africa and a billionaire in NY equal access to the world’s information. In the future, AI will democratize the ability for everyone to have equal access to services ranging from healthcare to finance advice.

• AI will be your friend.
• AI will be your doctor.
• AI will be your accountant.
• AI will be your hacker.
• AI will be your teacher.
• AI will be your trainer.
• AI will be your fashion designer.
• AI will be your chef.
• AI will be your entertainer.
• AI will be your driver.

And the list goes on and on. And likely it will do all of these things for free, or will eventually become free, independent of who you are or where you live. AI will give everyone equal informational power, it will demonetize and democratize almost every service. It will dramatically improve the quality of life of everyone on the planet. And equally importantly it will push for a world without scarcity, a world of abundance.

A Massive Opportunity

The vision of AI will forever change the world. But that vision will take time to reach, many more years of research and development. And most importantly it will take the innovation of bright thinkers and the flexibility of start-ups to achieve that vision.

Large firms such as IBM and Google are currently at the forefront of research, but as processing power decreases in cost and as more publications/research become public or open source, it will be smaller new companies with radical ideas in natural language processing, cognitive architectures, and pattern recognition that will begin building prototype AI’s at lightning speeds.

This provides a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs. As AI is beginning to make headlines on a weekly basis, new ideas are pouring out from every corner of academia and industry. AI is being applied to new domains never thought before everyday from apps for dating to dashboards of cars all the way to your Instagram account. It is simply put the gold rush of our lifetime. Those who are driven and passionate will not miss this opportunity; it is not only a huge investment payoff but it is literally building the future.