Brave new world of AI offers hope of service with a smile

Who remembers what the internet looked like in 1995? That was the year commercial traffic was officially allowed across the network for the first time.

The banks arrived online with scanned brochures, and Yahoo! dominated directories and searching. At the end of that year, a total of 16million people were using the internet.

The digital world today is unimaginably more advanced, interactive and competitive. Close to four billion people are online. Using a combination of cloud, search engines and social media, a web-based business starting today can reach 16million people in weeks.

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This dramatic evolution offers just an inkling of the potential of artificial intelligence.

"What I see in AI today is like the internet back in 1995, when we were just using Netscape to go online and research some information," said Maverick Shih, president of the Build Your Own Cloud smart products division at Acer.

"Then came a bookstore called Amazon, services like weather, and suddenly we had the all-encompassing internet services you have today. That is about to happen in AI."

Speaking to Business Times during the Next@Acer global news conference in New York last week, Shih argued that the current applications of AI, like smart assistants and chatbots, were merely low-hanging fruit. Its potential uses were almost unimaginable, but the clues were already available.

"Labour-intensive information-processing jobs still use human beings, but will soon use AI.

"Right now, on Google Photo, instead of searching by remembering when you took a pic, you can type in a keyword and it identifies the location or the subject in the photo. That's happening in my own library. Imagine where it could go. Imagine what can happen when business applications are connected to the cloud and start leveraging AI.

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"We will also see AI in the Internet of Things, when we connect the cyber world and the physical world of tangible things.

"Take digital signage. Imagine every digital sign is connected to the cloud, and you combine it with precision marketing, based on who is looking at the sign. The sign will see who the audience is and display personalised advertising."

For this to happen, he said, computers needed to move beyond the current cutting edge of AI, which is focused on a computer hearing and understanding instructions. The next step, he said, was to combine this with listening and seeing.

"At that stage, we can expect service robots to become more visible. Not like the toy robots we have today, but something that understands you, with more and more functionality. Today, hearing is no longer much of a problem for robots, but, once the problem of seeing and watching is solved, the service robot will become much more feasible.

"The area we've focused on is elderly care. We already have a special purpose tablet called GrandPad, with a service built in for seniors. With service robotics, ageing communities will be one of the growth areas for AI.

"Companies that use both the cloud and AI will be able to respond much faster to the competition. The rest will seem slow by comparison."

Goldstuck is the founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee