Emerging Technologies that will change our world
Business leaders know they must prepare for
technological upheavals in the years ahead. But keeping up-to-date on new
technologies—to say nothing of understanding their complexities and forecasting
those shifts—is an overwhelming task.
We are picks along with a quick encapsulation
of each technology and some potential business use cases.
Artificial Intelligence
The holy grail of artificial intelligence
research is general AI, a machine that is self-aware and commands intelligence
equal to a people. These theoretical systems would be our intellectual
equals—well, until v2.0 drops and we fall to a distant second.
Until then we have narrow AI, which are systems
that perform very specific tasks. That may seem too limited, but narrow AI
already powers systems like SPAM filters, Google Maps, and virtual assistants
such as Siri. And its use cases are projected to diversify even more.
As Max Tegmark, physicist and machine-learning
researcher, told Big Think in an interview: “What we’re seeing now is that
machine intelligence is spreading out a little bit from those narrow peaks and
getting a bit broader.”
Chatbots, logistics, self-driving cars, virtual nursing assistants, personalized textbooks and tutors, and even artificial creativity: These are just a few of the applications that narrow AI can improve or bring to light in the coming years.