Rise of the planet of the machines

I was talking to my grandmother the other week about an ad she viewed on Facebook. She saw an ad for a shirt that said something about dogs and quilting and she wanted to know how Facebook knew she liked those things. She wanted to know if Facebook was listening to her via her smart phone. I assured her that Facebook was not wiring tapping her iPhone listening in on her quilting discussions. What I proceeded to explain to her was that Facebook and large tech companies in general keep and store large amounts of user interaction data. This data may be what profiles you click on, what posts you like, and who you are friends with. They use machine learning to extract useful inferences about the users. These inferences are things that may be interesting to the individual. As the data increases and we refine our likes and dislikes the platform learns and adjusts the personal models to feed us content we want before we know we want it. This may seem scary or weird but go on your little sisters Netflix profile and you will soon realize that the recommendations are much different and choosing something you actually want to watch becomes much harder. These recommendations and models used to deliver us content are slowly becoming more and more accurate to the point where people are having questions around whether or not the tech companies are “listening to us”.

With 2020 on the horizon its interesting to think about what the next decade will bring. Over the last few years we have seen an explosion in smart devices. Everything from our TVs to our fridges and washing machines and light bulbs are connected and have ‘smart’ abilities. The convenience these devices bring to our everyday lives in the terms of time saving may seem small but take them away we would suddenly loose our minds at the inconvenience of having to manually adjust the volume on the TV or shut the lights. We can use an Alexa device to order something from Amazon and receive it at the front door the next day. No longer are we required to travel to the store to buy things. Time saving convenience is the future of technology whether we like it or not. Humans are very intelligent and arguably the most intelligent species in the universe, but it seems as if we are using that intelligence to be lazy. To be able to sit back and enjoy the ride on this big living rock we call Earth, and there is nothing wrong with that.

So what does the future hold for us humans as we let become more and more lazy an let machines carry out day to day chores? It is pretty evident that machine learning technologies are about to see a large growth spurt. Companies utilizing “Artificial Intelligence” will see growth similar to companies in the dot com bubble of the 90s. This has already been going on but as machine learning technology becomes more open source and accessible we will see smaller companies come up as major players in niche fields of the AI market. Specialized medical imagining companies, agricultural data analysis, and financial data analysis companies will harness the power of deep neural networks and treasure troves of data to provide accurate and detailed reporting and intelligence to large corporations.

The real leap in the AI market is happening with smart assistants. Google, Siri, Alexa are common and very successful smart assistants with loads of features and connectivity. Creating an omniscient assistant coupled with personalized and private data stores will make them much more adoptable and convenient for the end user. Having the same assistant inside your house and inside your car moving seamlessly across both platforms paired with a strong context engine to keep track and deliver assistance to the user based on what they are doing will be crucial. Delivering a JARVIS type AI the consumers will bring convenience and time saving benefits to the end users. Google, Amazon and Apple are dominating this space currently with their hardware devices and massive computing infrastructure. This does not mean there is no room for competition. The war is only just getting started.

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