03/04/2017 Past, Present and Future of Articial Intelligence | Sanjeev Kapoor | Pulse | LinkedIn

Past, Present and Future of Artificial

Intelligence
Published on March 30, 2017

Sanjeev Kapoor Follow

10 1 1
Entrepreneur, Advisor, Angel Investor

The AI vision was articulated over seventy years ago when Alan Turing proposed the
Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence and Isaac Asimov published his Three
Laws of Robotics. Articial Intelligence (AI), since then, has been dened as a pool of
technologies that enable machines to perceive their surrounding environments, reason
over their context and ultimately act in a way similar to humans. AI makes machines
intelligent and enables them to perform complex tasks such as understanding problems,
learning and perceiving situations, planning strategies about confronting problems and
ultimately controlling other machines. Over the years the acceptance of Articial
Intelligence has grown signicantly which has led to a more advanced and better AI
technology and a broader range of applications. In following paragraphs we briey
explore the past, the present and the most important: The Future of Articial
Intelligence.

The Past: AIs Historic milestones

For nearly six decades AI has been evolving at a steady pace. Its evolution is reected
in the improvement of AI technologies such as machine learning and AI programming,
but mainly in the evolving intelligence of AI applications. In 1958 the Lisp
programming language was invented at MIT by John McCarthy. Lisp is considered as
one of the languages that is best suited for developing AI applications. Then years later,
in 1968, a programmer called Richard Greenblatt, built an intelligent knowledge-based
chess-playing program, which managed to achieve a class-C rating in tournament play.

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This chess-playing programme was a forerunner for several other AI applications,

including programmes that beat the chess world champion.

Another important milestone was for AI was in 1979, when INTERNIST a knowledge-
based medical diagnosis program was developed that could leverage clinical knowledge
to reach its diagnosis. This was one of the rst expert systems in the medical domain.
Beyond medical and gaming applications, Allstar Advice Inc. developed the rst
commercial strategic and managerial advisory system was made in 1987. The system
was called Alacrity and was able to parse and interpret nancial models and nancial
statements based on a collection of over 3,000 rules.

Another path-breaking moment was in 1997, when the world watched IBMs Deep Blue
chess machine defeat the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In the same year,
the rst ofcial RoboCup soccer tournament was organized with the participation of
almost 40 teams of interacting robots. This milestone signaled the rise of sophisticated
robots and their use in various applications. Till 2005, Honda's ASIMO robot, an
articially intelligent humanoid robot, was the rst machine that was able to walk as
fast as a human. ASIMO was used to deliver trays to customers in restaurants. Two
years later the Checkers game was solved by a checkers-playing computer programthat
cannot lose. Ever. This was created by a team of researchers from the University of
Alberta, Canada. At the same time, Google started its efforts towards building a self-
driving car, which were ofcially announced in 2009.

The Present: where we stand with the current AI innovations and

applications

At present, AI is already used in a wide range of enterprise scale applications.

Prominent examples include:

Vacuum cleaners, which incorporate AI based controllers in order to provide

thorough coverage of the space to be cleaned. AI technology enables vacuum
cleaners such asiRobots Roombato adapt to real world clutter and furniture. Also,
AI empowered cleaners are able to keep track of their position, based on the use of
visual landmarks within the space.

State-of-the-art smart cars, which come with a host of AI based features for
increased safety and comfort, such as automatic braking, anti-lock braking systems
(ABS), collision avoidance systems, alerts about pedestrians, airbag control, traction
control systems, electronic stability control systems, intelligent cruise controls and
more.

Self-driving cars, which are an extension of state-of-the-art cars with autonomous

driving capabilities. Following Googles announcements about its autonomous car
vision, Tesla provided, in 2012, a working implementation of a semi-autonomous
car. Nowadays, most car manufacturers are implementing roadmaps for rolling out
self-driving vehicles shortly after 2020. As part of their self-driving vehicles
strategies, manufacturers are also establishing exclusive partnerships with institutes

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that are at the forefront of AI research in order to endow their cars with the ability to
reason about the driving context and take optimal driving decisions.

Personal Assistant Robots, which provide one of the most tangible applications of
AI in the consumer space. Assistive robots engage in tasks such as the provision of
information to their users, the signaling of alerts in emergency cases, as well as the
entertainment of the users. One example isASUS Zenbo robot.

The above list is not exhaustive, yet it is representative of real-life uses of the AI today.
This increased penetration of robots in pragmatic applications is accounted to the
radical advances in AI technology. Indeed, during the last couple of years, we have
witnessed new milestones in the evolution of AI technology. One year ago, in March
2016, general-purpose rather than application specic AI was demonstrated, as
Googles AphaGo system beat Lee Sedol, a 9 dan professional Korean champion in the
GO game. Even though this sounds similar to Deep Blues achievements, it is
associated with some fundamental advancements comparing to older AI platforms. In
particular, AlphaGo used reinforcement learning and neural networks, which provided
much more than a brute force calculation of all available options in the game.
Reinforcement learning and neural networks operates in a way similar to the human
brain. This allowed AlphaGo to be successful in the GO game, which in orders of
magnitude is much more complex than chess.

Future Outlook

In the future, AI will continue to evolve in a way that will enable new disruptive
business models and functionalities. It will also play a key role in improving quality of
life through enabling humans to complete tasks more efciently and in less time. In this
direction, emerging deep learning technology is expected to play a key role in analyzing
more inputs in a timely fashion, while at the same time identifying complex patterns
beyond what machine learning can currently provide.

Overall, we should expect the following trends in the deployment of AI:

Embedded AI: AI will be increasingly embedded in devices in various contexts,

including cars, consumer devices, search engines and more. We can expect most of
the future devices that comprise the Internet-of-Things to employ AI capabilities.

AI machines becoming more efcient than people:In the contexts where pure
information processing, than creativity, is required, AI machines will be much more
efcient than people. Likewise, people will increasingly like to get service from
machines rather than humans due to their efciency and zero-error performance.

Increased penetration in daily life activities: Personal assisted robots will

proliferate and start helping people in accomplishing more and more tasks. AI will
assist people in tasks such as medical treatments, food preparation and support with
laborious activities.

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Self-driving vehicles and safer transport: The advent of AI-enabled self-driving

cars will reduce the count of accidents signicantly, saving millions of lives and
leading to huge economic savings.

Augmenting human abilities: AI devices and robots will in the future give us
superhuman abilities, by extending our current capabilities in terms of faster
processing of information, as well as in terms of performing manual tasks that are
not possible nowadays.

Some of our best friends will be robots: Future robots are likely to be our
companions in addition to being valuable assistants. To this end, future robots may
be also able to understand human behavior, while feeling our emotions. As depicted
in the movie,HERthis relationship might not sound appealing today but will
provide a radically new human-centric dimension to AI.

And yet it is never possible to completely predict the future of technology and where its
headed. We do have good evidence that AI will positively disrupt our everyday lives,
while changing the world for the better and we should prepare to experience this
revolution and embrace all that it have to offer.

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Sanjeev Kapoor
Entrepreneur, Advisor, Angel Investor Follow
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Amit Sharma 3d
Talent Acquisition Manager at du
A very good and informative read ! thanks for Sharing Sanjeev Kapoor
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