About 30 years ago everyone thought that artificial intelligence (AI) would be the next big thing. Companies invested in expert systems only to discover they didn't have much power and we had a long ways to go before we could do anything really spectacular. Now it seems like you can't click through a website without hearing about AI, machine learning (ML), or deep learning (DL). This leads one to ask if AI really is the next big thing.
This morning I came across 2 articles on AI that I felt merited reading. The first talked about a new form of machine learning where the program or agent is given the freedom to explore new ideas randomly instead of being rewarded for achieving some goal. Should a goal be reached, the agent stores the steps necessary to repeat the process. If a more efficient way of achieving that goal is found, the memory is overwritten with the better steps. The reason this is of interest to me is that is has been used to play several computer games successfully when other AI agents based on reinforcement learning have failed. Interestingly this is how some of our most successful innovations have emerged: thinking about novel ways of solving an existing problem.
The second article I read today came from a consulting organization talking about how AI is going to revolutionize our economy. While they admit that a number of jobs will be replaced by AI, they also point out that a higher number of jobs are being created to implement it than those being lost. The article then went on to estimate the amount of money being spent developing and using AI. It is not a small number.
My takeaway from both articles is that the field of artificial intelligence is getting a lot of interest and is showing the same promise that the personal computer industry had 30 years ago. There are also a lot of new ideas in AI and it will be an area of tremendous innovation. If I had a son or daughter headed off to college and wondering where the money is, I would definitely steer him or her towards AI.
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