Artificial Intelligence - marching into the common man's life

Couple of weeks back, I read a news article that US army plans to actively use Artificial Intelligence for creating cyber soldiers and also to fly its fighter jets. This was not at all astonishing, but the next piece of this article really was. DARPA has admitted that enemies are already ahead of them i.e. this technology is already being in use on the battlefield by several others. One other striking news was that in the military budget of 2016, US has kept $15 bn separate only for Artificial Intelligence. Most of the countries entire defence budget itself is lesser than this amount.

Usage of AI is becoming common day by day, with Mobile assistant (Siri, Google Now), Speech recognition, IVR’s, Medical surgeries and several others using this on a very active basis. 2015 has been considered to be a breakthrough year for AI inmany ways. Various companies are seen testing self-driven or autonomous cars which they claim would ensure increase of road safety. Just as I have been writing this post, there was the news that the National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration (NHTSA) has given support to Google’s Self-driven vehicles by declaring that the AI system in control of the vehicle can be termed as a driver. There still is some time to actually see the autonomous cars running on the roads, but hurdles in its way surely are decreasing by the day. All of the IT giants,from Google to Apple and IBM to TCS are investing large amounts to build expertise in this field. The Healthcare industry is also seeing a major transformation with the concept of Robotic Doctors. With Smart Cities and Connected Living set to become such an important part of common man’s life, AI is the perfect bridge between technology and human behaviour.

Over the years since 1990’s when the computer started becoming part of a common-man’s life, technology was initially thought of as being dumb and non-cognitive. For many years, this always remained as the biggest limitation as well as challenge. But now with AI, the scenario is set to change. It is fast transforming technology into intelligent technology. Very soon, it will be an integral part of our daily lives.

All said and done, would AI ever be able to re-create the human touch… this is a question which would be very difficult to answer. However, human life is set to undergo a rapid transformation due to AI is something that can be concluded beyond any doubt.