AI in X Years

In the short term the promise and peril of AI is legion.

AI will deliver some of our brightest fantasies and our darkest nightmares.

Why both?

Because AI is a universal technology. It’s flexible enough to do whatever we want it to do.

And that means it will reflect the good and evil of its creators:

Us.

For all the worry about Terminators and machines taking over, AI is not even close to sentient. It doesn’t have its own desires. It’s not taking over the world any time soon, although we’ll explore that possibility when we gaze 500 years into the future.

What we have now is narrow AI. It’s limited to single tasks and it absolutely does whatever we tell it to do. It’s under human control. If it does bad things we have only ourselves to blame.

Where we’re going in the next five to fifteen years is a future dominated by that narrow artificial intelligence.

AI and how it’s used will reflect and magnify our nature a thousandfold, both the dark and the light.

It will live in your cameras, your phone, your computer, your glasses and places public and private.

It will power marketing, manufacturing, materials science and both preventative and palliative health care. It will level up surveillance and weapons technology. It will change the way we work, how we work with each other and how the world works.

It will become our friend, our co-worker, and our enemy.

As Francois Chollet said, “AI will become our interface to the world.”

In short, there will be nothing outside of the reach of AI.

Welcome to the dawn of the age of intelligence.

Come with me now and I’ll show you how it all begins and how it leads us into an intelligence explosion that will make the great shifts of humans past, hunter-gather to farming, farming to industrial revolution, and industrial revolution to the information age, look trivial by comparison.

Read the whole story: AI in Five, Fifty and Five Hundred YearsRead more Artificial Intelligence Stories, the Latest Tech Stories and the Hacker Noon Editors’ Choice Stories.

Back to the Internet!

P.S. Check out this great Reddit/r/Programming discussion about a recent article we published by Angel List.

AI in X Years was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.