Question: What purposes are you most excited for AI to be used for?

Carl Peter Robinson answered on 14 Jan 2024: last edited 14 Jan 2024 5:18 pm

This question makes me smile as I like to think about the positive and entertaining things we can employ AI for. A few of my favourites at the moment are:
1. Applications of AI in social assistance – numerous societies on our planet are encountering the problem of loneliness where individuals have no one, or very few people, to interact with in their daily lives. If we can use AI systems, either as part of a smart home or built into a robotic companion, to provide some sort of company and assistance to these individuals, I would consider that a great achievement. I’m talking about these AI systems having proper conversational capabilities and the ability to learn about their “user”, to be able to stimulate them mentally and spot signs of concern or danger if they are ill or have had an accident, or about to have one.

2. Imagine playing a video game where there are no non-playable characters (NPCs), because they each have the capacity to learn about you as a player and develop as characters of their own, through each having an AI engine. In turn, this would create wholly unique experiences for each gamer. The level of interaction and complexity you could weave into a game’s narrative becomes very exciting if you consider this. Maybe elements of this happen already, I don’t know – I don’t play a lot of video games as I can’t find the time to do so. Next, imagine these scenarios but with hologram technology instead. Combinations of AI with virtual reality, augmented reality, and holograms are going to be exciting for numerous industries.

3. Numerous applications of robotics will benefit from having AI-based control systems. This will enable more effective human-robot collaboration in the workplace and in social environments. The capacity for robots to better learn their environments and how to interact in them and explore them is also a fascinating field to me. Recording and analysing that data, on how they learned, is also extremely fascinating.

4. Naturally, the benefits AI tools can bring to healthcare and hospitals fill me with optimism about combatting existing diseases, assisting surgeons with delicate operations, and helping shrink those ever-growing waiting lists.

5. A lot of the latest, trending AI is massive! As in, the models are huge and the resources required to train them are enormous (cost and energy, and carbon footprint!!) such that they can then be effective or useful. I’m excited to see how future versions/iterations of these models, or even how brand new models come into existence that are much more efficient, smaller, and less resource-hungry, but can still perform as well, if not better. Like with the computer industry, how computers started out as enormous room-filling machines that eventually got smaller and smaller such that you can have a really powerful one in your pocket, can we make AI systems go the same way? I really hope so, and I believe this will happen.

6. Then there’s the more philosophical, cognitive side where we consider things like, are our current AI model architectures the most effective? Do they mimic the human brain and the way it learns so efficiently? Can they be made to understand, plan, and reason? Are we still missing something fundamental? Is self-supervised learning the way forward? There are lots of deep questions still to answer. Maybe you could solve one of them?! There are lots of opportunities to contribute to this amazing field so I hope you feel inspired to get involved 🙂