The Next Decade

Google's Dr. Francis said, “The future for AI careers is very bright. You look at the world 100 years ago and nothing had nerves except a few telegraph wires. Every object was ‘dead’ [unwired]. You look at the world a century from now and everything will be wired. We won't be having a phone to hold a conversation. Maybe the very paint on the walls will be the projection screen, and simply writing notes on the desktop will be transmittable because the desk will be a wired object. That potential future is going to present far more information to the world than a human can process. Without help, it'll be unmanageable.”

According to Dr. Francis, computers and machines will be a great deal “smarter” about how they present information. The great uses and applications of AI will be necessary to manage information so that the machines may respond to people in ways that are more useful and efficient. To do that, computer scientists and AI experts need to model human response to everything from the way we perceive the world to how to spend our discretionary time. “Artificial intelligence will be creating machines that take the full pipeline of information that the world generates, that can understand language as well as humans, that can summarize what they know into useful information, and that can make decisions that humans will think will make sense,” Dr. Francis said.

The most visible solution to human problems will be robots, as seen with Honda's ASIMO (named after Isaac Asimov), but the applications will seep into almost every mechanical device. Additionally, computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil wrote, “Non-biological intelligence will match the capabilities of human intelligence by 2029. And in the 2030s, we will merge with this technology by sending intelligent nanobots [micro robots] into our brains through the capillaries.” In his 2006 book, The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil went so far as to predict that human genetics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology will converge by 2045. To get there, people will need to apply their creativity in careers that can only be found on the cutting edge.