Artificial Intelligence as the Origin of the New Economy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of robotics that aims to provide a high level of intelligence to machines. The term was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.
There have been huge advances in the field since then. Some examples are IBM Watson, an AI famous for being the first machine to beat a human in the contest Jeopardy. Siri, the personal assistant of Apple's iPhone. Or FaceNet, Google's computer vision system that was able to beat the human accuracy in face recognition.
Even though these are well-known examples of AI, the field is becoming essential in many industries. In finance, many companies are starting to use AI algorithms to predict financial projections or changes in the stock market. In medicine, deep learning is used to detect cancer or research new medications. In marketing, machine learning is used to cluster those buyers that can be convinced before making a personalized promotion. The capabilities of smart machines help to enhance human experience and expertise. AI allows examining huge sets of data, finding patterns to get the maximum outcome and saving us time.
Therefore, we could reach a point where people working in finance, marketing, medicine or other industries change how they work completely. Instead of relying on personal expertise in finance, marketing or medicine, they will need to learn how to code and develop AI algorithms, as people had to learn to use a computer 30 years ago. Coding will become a basic tool to do any kind of job.
The Growth of AI
All these changes are starting to happen, and big corporations are trying to be first movers. Google bought DeepMind, one of the most advanced deep learning companies. They also hired Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil, probably the two most important scientist on AI right now. Facebook hired Yann LeCun and Baidu Andrew Ng, and all of them plus Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have bought many AI startups.
There is no doubt that AI is going to change everything. I believe it is really exciting to be living these amazing changes.