Artificial Intelligence, Future
The 5 Most Anticipated Sci-Fi AI Use Cases We’re All Waiting To See in Real Life!
If you are not living in a cave, which is in a cave itself, then you probably heard that AI is the new trending technology. It is affecting most of our today routines, and we all have been using its services. If you don’t believe you have been affected, just remember how YouTube proposed to you just the right videos so you could keep watching for 2 more hours instead of the 5 minutes intended. How Facebook suggested that you may know your neighbor. Or how you found yourself with a $200 basket on Amazon rather than just the $5 pencil you come to buy initially.
These are just examples of how AI is affecting our days. We don’t put much attention on them because, well, they’re just not as exciting as we imagined. It does not look like Terminator’s Skynet AI.
However, it does not mean we’re not getting to this. It may take longer than excepted, but AI has a bright (or dark, depending on the perspective) future. Let’s dig into the 5 most interesting AI applications that we are all waiting to see.
Robots
Even if the state of research in the robotic field is already at a very advanced level, we still did not get what we were waiting for. And by robots, I of course don’t mean just like the ones in the movie I-Robots, but also all kinds of automated physical tasks like self-driving cars, planes, restaurant cookers, and so on.
This is the most advanced AI use case though. We’ll probably see the generalization of autonomous cars in a decade, and the rest will follow.
Predict diseases
Healthcare is probably the industry that will see the biggest disruptions in the incoming years but is also one of the most complicated. Due to the very complex legislation, the psychological barriers that stop us from putting our lives in the hands of an AI, but also to the lack of quality data, which is of the sinews of war here.
Actually, healthcare is already a big playground for AI algorithms: detecting breast cancer in radiological images, or detecting heart diseases in ECGs, all of this better than a physician.
However, in my perspective, the biggest breakthrough is not in detecting a disease you have from various types of data, but rather to predict that you’ll get a specific one long before it happens. Imagine you could know that you’ll get cancer 2 years in advance with a very precise percentage, this could change the way we do medicine today.
I don’t think this is too much futuristic even if it looks like, we just need enough data!
Reviving the deads
Of course, I don’t mean actually bringing back a person from the dead in flesh and bones. But imagine if you could have a very faithful copy of your wife who died years back. This is not an episode from Black Mirror, but a real use case already being developed by Microsoft (they even submitted a patent).
Millennials are generating more data than any other people in history. Just think how much you could know about someone if you have access to all his social network posts, messages, pictures, search history, voice, video, … you could know how this person looks like, how he speaks, how he thinks, how he swears.
Imagine aggregating these data, and creating an AI from these, wouldn’t it be very close to the person you knew? It can be in a form of a chatbot (like the Microsoft patent), an avatar in a virtual world, or even a robot the day we could make one.
Artistic AI
By artistic, I don’t only mean paintings and writing stories, but any new invention that is the result of our human imagination.
We actually already have the possibility to generate paintings and stories using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), i.e. a type of AI algorithms. However, like (almost) all current AIs, it uses data that already exist. To generate painting, the AI needs to be trained on thousands of past paintings. It’s kind of just mixing what it has already seen before.
The real breakthrough is when the AI will be able to generate new content, without seeing anything similar before, just like humans….or not? We are maybe just like a GAN: generating content from what we saw before. But this another discussion!
Intuitive AI
In my perspective, this is the only and ultimate disruption, the one that will cause what is commonly called: The Singularity.
To understand why it is the most important discovery of all times in the field of AI, we should first understand how current AIs work. Simply told, an AI is a mathematical function representing the data it has been trained on.
Let’s take a very simple AI that recognizes cats in pictures. To be able to do so, you need to give it thousands of pictures of cats in different positions, of different colors, so it can build a representation of what a cat picture is. Now, let’s be honest, that’s not how humans learn. A 3-year-old kid can recognize a cat in any position and of any color, just by showing him one a couple of times.
My personal beliefs are that we’re not actually doing “Intelligence” that is “Artificial”. At most, we can call it “machine learning”, but the best term is probably just “Data Science”. We are just optimizing a mathematical equation so it could represent the maximum number of samples of a specific data type.
The next (true) AI, will be the one that can recognize objects from the context, from their use, and understand their nature, without trying to foolishly fit an equation to some data. Just like humans do.
Is this possible? Maybe, probably. Should this scare us, I believe so. When will this happen? hard to say. I think that today, we are just not looking in the right direction.
Conclusion
There are probably more interesting use cases. This ranking is more or less personal, some may see others be worth cited in this list. But what we can be sure of, the disruption that AI will bring to our lives is far bigger than we can imagine. And we are just at the beginning of its rise.
