Although the year 2018 was the time when the AI became popular, monopolizing television news and conversations in all sectors, this year promises to be that of commercial and technological consolidation. Even taking into account that AI is rather a desire, a technological longing to build smart machines (something that we may never see), what we currently call AI is a set of very useful tools that will continue to improve the coming decades.
In this article, we bring you a forecast of the main trends that are expected for this technology and of which you can apply in your businesses by meeting with
app development companies.
1. Greater regulation
With the scandals of Facebook and the recognition of the scientific community of the dangers of not regulating machine learning, there is greater global, political and technological attention to regulate AI. AI is about to impact the world in an immediate and significant way in 2019, so regulatory plans should be underway in most countries.
2. Technological consolidation
In the world of business, machine learning is becoming more popular. In addition, the maturity of the cloud (highlighting
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft) allows greater integration and access to AI tools more easily. The result is that in 2019, a greater number of companies will have access to automation capabilities, improving their business processes.
3. Virtual assistants
This year is the year of the virtual assistants, highlighting
Amazon Alexa and
Google Home. We will see new developments, commercial expansion and greater integration with third-party products and services.
The smart speaker market peaked in 2018. About 41% of Americans own one of these devices (21.5% more than in 2017), according to TechCrunch. This penetration into the home means that Artificial Intelligence has begun its massive assault on the consumer. What will this mean? Billions of dollars for Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Baidu and others to develop a new way of interacting with consumers and closing the gap between online and offline.
4. Expansion in the Retail sector
AmazonGo consists of a physical store without dependents. Different AI-based systems allow you to recognize when each user picks up and inserts a certain product in the basket, making ATMs and many employees obsolete. When you finish making the purchase, you simply leave the store and the surcharge is automatically made in your Amazon account, without having to queue or scan any item in the output.
Apparently, Amazon intends to open at least 3,000 of these stores by 2021. This model, which already has pilot stores, is the pinnacle of AI in retail. In 2019, we will see new stores and other competitors start copying this.
5. Expansion in the Health sector
It is not necessary to have followed the developments of Google Medical Brain to realize that the AI will be applied to health care in an accelerated way in 2019. The AI could be at the center of the creation of a more patient-centered care system, starting precisely in the intelligent home in the future, through which the health of each member of the family can be monitored more easily.
The AI will have access to our electronic medical records and will be involved in almost all advances in neuroscience, genetics, cancer diagnosis, and early diagnosis systems in the coming years. AI can predict patient outcomes by helping research and development of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Robotic and automated surgeries will continue to grow, and as large technology companies become more involved in health care, our health data will be used for specific innovations for AI.
Alexa's skills already help citizens around the world cope with chronic illnesses and conditions and to help family members care for their loved ones. Healthcare is undoubtedly one of the largest areas in which the impact of AI will most be felt in 2019.
6. Arms race
The Chinese and Russian Armed Forces and the Advanced Research Agency of the USA (DARPA) are investing huge amounts of money in the app development of AI in their weapons capacity. Especially worrying is the development of these three nations in automated killing machines (currently in the early stages in drones).
For the USA, the AI "offers a new route to sustain its military superiority, while reducing the cost and risk of its soldiers." For Russia and China "offers something more valuable: the ability to break the US military superiority."
Lora Saalman, vice president of the Asia/Pacific program of the East/West Institute, highlights the current fear of false negatives in autonomous weapons. In addition, Chinese artificial intelligence is about to technologically surpass the American one.
7. The problem of human diversion
Many of the current AI developments have a problem: human bias. AI algorithms are based on neural networks that need data to "learn". The largest source of data available for this task is the Internet, but of course, the Internet is populated by human-made content, with our errors and biases of all kinds.
The challenge of addressing human bias in AI systems will be at the forefront in 2019. It is currently the Achilles heel of AI in many services. Until this is corrected, our civilization will not fully trust Artificial Intelligence. We want neutral, fair and accurate systems.
We are beginning to discover biases in the most rudimentary algorithms and there are biases in all our systems. Better datasets and better training are just part of the solution. It is also possible that approaches like
Google AlphaZero, which can learn from scratch based on trial and error, are one of the solutions.
These are some of the trends of AI technology that the world is experiencing. You can take advantage of AI by integrating this technology into your day to day business processes. You can achieve this by meeting with app development companies.