From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a
gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually
a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now.
This is one of those articles. It was originally published October 19, 2016. We hope you enjoy it!
How
will AI shape the average North American city by 2030? A panel of
experts assembled as part of a century-long study into the impact of AI
thinks its effects will be profound.
The
One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence is the brainchild of Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and a managing director at Microsoft Research.
Every five years a panel of experts will assess the current state of
AI and its future directions. The first panel, comprised of experts in
AI, law, political science, policy, and economics, was launched last
fall and decided to frame their report around the impact AI will have on
the average American city. Here’s how they think it will affect eight
key domains of city life in the next fifteen years.
1. Transportation
The speed of the transition to AI-guided transport may catch the
public by surprise. Self-driving vehicles will be widely adopted by
2020, and it won’t just be cars — driverless delivery trucks, autonomous
delivery drones, and personal robots will also be commonplace.
Uber-style “cars as a service” are likely to replace car ownership,
which may displace public transport or see it transition towards similar
on-demand approaches. Commutes will become a time to relax or work
productively, encouraging people to live further from home, which could
combine with reduced need for parking to drastically change the face of
modern cities.
Mountains of data from increasing numbers of sensors will allow
administrators to model individuals’ movements, preferences, and goals,
which could have major impact on the design city infrastructure.
Humans won’t be out of the loop, though. Algorithms that allow
machines to learn from human input and coordinate with them will be
crucial to ensuring autonomous transport operates smoothly. Getting this
right will be key as this will be the public’s first experience with
physically embodied AI systems and will strongly influence public
perception.
2. Home and Service Robots
Robots that do things like deliver packages and clean offices will
become much more common in the next 15 years. Mobile chipmakers are
already squeezing the power of last century’s supercomputers into
systems-on-a-chip, drastically boosting robots’ on-board computing
capacity.
Cloud-connected robots
will be able to share data to accelerate learning. Low-cost 3D sensors
like Microsoft’s Kinect will speed the development of perceptual
technology, while advances in speech comprehension will enhance robots’
interactions with humans. Robot arms in research labs today are likely
to evolve into consumer devices around 2025.
But the cost and complexity of reliable hardware and the difficulty
of implementing perceptual algorithms in the real world mean
general-purpose robots are still some way off. Robots are likely to
remain constrained to narrow commercial applications for the foreseeable
future.
3. Healthcare
AI’s impact on healthcare in the next 15 years will depend more on
regulation than technology. The most transformative possibilities of AI
in healthcare require access to data, but the FDA has failed to find
solutions to the difficult problem of balancing privacy and access to
data. Implementation of electronic health records has also been poor.
If these hurdles can be cleared,
AI could automate the legwork of diagnostics
by mining patient records and the scientific literature. This kind of
digital assistant could allow doctors to focus on the human dimensions
of care while using their intuition and experience to guide the process.
At the population level, data from patient records, wearables, mobile
apps, and personal genome sequencing will make personalized medicine a
reality. While fully automated radiology is unlikely, access to huge
datasets of medical imaging will enable training of machine learning
algorithms that can “triage” or check scans, reducing the workload of
doctors.
Intelligent walkers, wheelchairs, and exoskeletons will help keep the
elderly active while smart home technology will be able to support and
monitor them to keep them independent. Robots may begin to enter
hospitals carrying out simple tasks like delivering goods to the right
room or
doing sutures
once the needle is correctly placed, but these tasks will only be
semi-automated and will require collaboration between humans and robots.
4. Education
The line between the classroom and individual learning will be
blurred by 2030. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) will interact with
intelligent tutors and other AI technologies to allow personalized
education at scale. Computer-based learning won’t replace the classroom,
but online tools will help students learn at their own pace using
techniques that work for them.
AI-enabled education systems will learn individuals’ preferences, but
by aggregating this data they’ll also accelerate education research and
the development of new tools. Online teaching will increasingly widen
educational access, making learning lifelong, enabling people to
retrain, and increasing access to top-quality education in developing
countries.
Sophisticated virtual reality will allow students to immerse
themselves in historical and fictional worlds or explore environments
and scientific objects difficult to engage with in the real world.
Digital reading devices will become much smarter too, linking to
supplementary information and translating between languages.
5. Low-Resource Communities
In contrast to the dystopian visions of sci-fi, by 2030 AI will help
improve life for the poorest members of society. Predictive analytics
will let government agencies better allocate limited resources by
helping them forecast environmental hazards or building code violations.
AI planning could help distribute excess food from restaurants to food
banks and shelters before it spoils.
Investment in these areas is under-funded though, so how quickly
these capabilities will appear is uncertain. There are fears valueless
machine learning could inadvertently discriminate by correlating things
with race or gender, or surrogate factors like zip codes. But AI
programs are easier to hold accountable than humans, so they’re more
likely to help weed out discrimination.
6. Public Safety and Security
By 2030 cities are likely to rely heavily on AI technologies to
detect and predict crime. Automatic processing of CCTV and drone footage
will make it possible to rapidly spot anomalous behavior. This will not
only allow law enforcement to react quickly but also forecast when and
where crimes will be committed. Fears that bias and error could lead to
people being unduly targeted are justified, but well-thought-out systems
could actually counteract human bias and highlight police malpractice.
Techniques like speech and gait analysis could help interrogators and
security guards detect suspicious behavior. Contrary to concerns about
overly pervasive law enforcement, AI is likely to make policing more
targeted and therefore less overbearing.
7. Employment and Workplace
The effects of AI will be felt most profoundly in the workplace. By
2030 AI will be encroaching on skilled professionals like lawyers,
financial advisers, and radiologists. As it becomes capable of taking on
more roles, organizations will be able to scale rapidly with relatively
small workforces.
AI is more likely to replace tasks rather than jobs in the near term,
and it will also create new jobs and markets, even if it’s hard to
imagine what those will be right now. While it may reduce incomes and
job prospects, increasing automation will also lower the cost of goods
and services, effectively making everyone richer.
These structural shifts in the economy will require political rather
than purely economic responses to ensure these riches are shared. In the
short run, this may include resources being pumped into education and
re-training, but longer term may require a far more comprehensive social
safety net or radical approaches like a guaranteed basic income.
8. Entertainment
Entertainment in 2030 will be interactive, personalized, and
immeasurably more engaging than today. Breakthroughs in sensors and
hardware will see virtual reality, haptics and companion robots
increasingly enter the home. Users will be able to interact with
entertainment systems conversationally, and they will show emotion,
empathy, and the ability to adapt to environmental cues like the time of
day.
Social networks already allow personalized entertainment channels,
but the reams of data being collected on usage patterns and preferences
will allow media providers to personalize entertainment to unprecedented
levels. There are concerns this could endow media conglomerates with
unprecedented control over people’s online experiences and the ideas to
which they are exposed.
But advances in AI will also make creating your own entertainment far
easier and more engaging, whether by helping to compose music or
choreograph dances using an avatar. Democratizing the production of
high-quality entertainment makes it nearly impossible to predict how
highly fluid human tastes for entertainment will develop.
Image Credit:
Asgord /
Shutterstock.com