The past decade has seen significant advances in the field of AI – take this computer playing Mario through machine learning or Watson, a robot who crushed its human competitors in a game of jeopardy and is now being used in medicine to find facts about patient history to make recommendations. As crazy as these advances have been, predictions suggest that they’ll seem like nothing in comparison to what’s coming next. It can be easy to develop a negative view of these advances in science and technology when we’re exposed to the creepiness of Black Mirror’s episodes, or the wave of media reports emphasizing the potentially dark side of AI (like the robots at the Facebook AI Research Lab creating their own language or Elon Musk’s warning that artificial intelligence will become a threat to people. Still though, the AI movement is here to stay, and it’s important to keep in mind the amazing potential it could have to improve our everyday lives. Here’s a list of 6 areas of our lives that’ll likely dramatically improve as a result of advances in AI.
1. Cooking
An automated kitchen by Moley Robotics. Moley Robotics
Cooking is an aspect of our everyday lives where AI has a potential to make big improvements, since it basically only requires that specific ingredients be combined according to a recipe. Products like the Moley Robotics robochef (able to cook 2000 meals and containing recipes, a dishwasher and a refrigerator) mean that we’ll able to have food cooked and prepared, as well as dishes washed, with the use of an app. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty amazing for busy midterm weeks. Of course, these kinds of products are still super expensive, but as they get increasingly common and become an integral part of homes, prices could be expected to decrease. Other products like the Hello Egg not only promise to assist consumers with executing recipes and helping them eat healthier, but also to help with ordering groceries for delivery, and with meal planning.
2. Shopping
Even today, AI is involved in customers’ everyday shopping experience in many ways, from chatbots in customer service to machine learning algorithms that gather information about consumers’ behaviours, activities and preferences to offer personalized recommendations. Recently, face-detection systems have been developed in China that will allow for payment authorization and access to facilities through facial recognition. Similarly, Wells Fargo and other organizations are working to develop voice-first payment technologies that will use “biometric” analysis of a user’s voice to secure financial transactions. These kinds of technology have the potential to save consumers a lot of a time and increase security in the shopping process. Artificial intelligence will also likely be used on the part of store owners – like Simbe Robotics’ Tally, the world’s first fully-autonomous shelf-auditing robot that performs functions like detecting pricing errors, providing inventory analytics and storing shelves.
3. Picking a Date
Okay, so this is where things can start to get a little creepy and start to look like a Black Mirror episode. But the idea here is that AI could essentially get to know a user well enough to take over their Tinder account and do the swiping for them. “In five years time,” explains Sean Rad, chairman of Tinder and Swipe Ventures, “Tinder might be so good you might be like ‘Hey Siri, what’s happening tonight’, and Tinder might pop up and say ‘There’s someone down the street you might be attracted to. She’s also attracted to you. She’s free tomorrow night. We know you both like the same band and it’s playing – would you like us to buy you tickets?’… and you have a match.”
4. Chores
Washing dishes, doing laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the apartment – I think we can all agree that household chores take up a lot of time and aren’t exactly the ideal way we’d like to be spending our time and energy. Not to worry, though: with companies like Elon Musk’s Open AI, technology is advancing to the point that domestic robots will eventually be doing these everyday tasks for us.
5. Driving
Self-driving cars are all the talk these days. By now, most people know that these cars will not only dramatically decrease the amount of time people spend in traffic, but they’ll also make the process of commuting to work a lot more efficient, allowing people to use this time to work productively, rest, socialize with friends, or for other leisure activities. These technological advances in the driving sector will likely occur faster than we might think. According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road before 2022; Audi announced at the CES 2017 that a self-driving car would be available by 2020, and Ford is working to offer fully self-driving vehicles by 2021.
6. Medical Field
The impact of AI on the healthcare systems could very well represent its largest and most powerful impact. Despite the lack of human rapport, researchers have argued that AI systems are quickly beginning to outperform even the most competent human doctors in terms of producing knowledge of human health and bringing precision and speed to detection, diagnosis and operations.
Are you convinced?
Photo Credits: Cover Photo, Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6