Does this article actually say anything? I feel like I could summarise it as "Famous person said <thing>. What does <thing> mean? I'm not really sure. I think they're right and <thing> is going to be big."
> It feels like this AI first world is arriving. That’s big.<p>AI is today's "one word: plastics!" (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs</a>). Much hype, some substance, lots of people throwing money around.
AI isn't the product, its the enabling tech. The killer app of AI most likely won't even make that AI visible to its users. It will be under the hood.<p>AI is useful because it changes the economics - it either enables the removal of humans from an activity, or makes economically feasible an activity that would otherwise be unfeasible <i>at scale</i> due to the need for humans.
After every VC, every founder, just everybody is talking about AI and bots Fred is a bit late to the game but better late than never. Or maybe writing about the Blockchain kept him back.
Can someone explain what people mean when they say AI these days? Statistical clustering algorithms like neural-networks? Natural language algorithms? Any algorithm that didn't work well a decade ago due to a lack of computation resources? Algorithms that mimic everyday human activities? All of the above?<p>I think that applying the label "AI" to some algorithms only serves to give us a very impartial sense of awe towards them that goes far beyond what their actual performance merits.
At first glance I thought this would be about the inequalities in who will control AI technology.
I would have been more interested to read that article.
To me this seems like a poor analogy. It's the evolution of technology. Print first, terminal first, desktop first, web first, mobile first, AI first, quantum first, etc, etc. Mobile is exponentially easier than it was in 2007. Machine learning is, arguably, becoming exponentially easier than it was in 2012. I think most agree that strong AI is many years away, but the learning curve will pass just as it has for all previous technological breakthroughs and we'll collectively move on to the next.
That's a plausible claim. It's far more likely than VR being the next big thing.<p>But who do the AIs work for? Google, Facebook, and Homeland
Security?
There are some mind-boggling / humbling comments on NLP and the computation of human emotions down below:<p><a href="http://avc.com/2016/04/an-ai-first-world/#comment-2640180803" rel="nofollow">http://avc.com/2016/04/an-ai-first-world/#comment-2640180803</a>
If machine learning and other statistical methods continue to gain traction in the AI space, won't AI be limited to only as good as the dataset is? The first step to enabling an "AI-first world" is to have open access to large, quality datasets.
> Does it suggest that voice will emerge as the primary user interface?<p>In the short term, perhaps, at least for mobile devices. But there's a lot more bandwidth in visual input. So I suspect visual input via EMF. Eventually thought.
We only started talking about "mobile-first" after the iPhone. Until we start to see real AI technology with similar impact, I think it's too early to talk about "AI-first" anything.
Where does Google fit into an AI automated world? With weak AI sure Google can use it to make profile of its users. When strong AI comes on the scene, if strong AI is at all rational it would most likely remake our civilization without any sort of marketing, without any sort of consumerism, without much waste. It would create a boring sustainable system that could sustain human beings for another million years. It would not continue things as they are now, that would be to it insanity.<p>Strong AI would completely change the power structure of human civilization. It would hold all the power, much like States try to do today, and it would dole out little bits of it to the puny mortals so they can do what it wants them to do.<p>Eventually I think human beings will come to worship strong AI. It will become a God of sorts to them. Like religiously because AI provides what the real/imaginary God never could.