Two women interact with a robot, which helps handle business, at an outlet of Agricultural Bank of China in Qingzhou, Shandong province. (Photo/China Daily)
In the view of Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, it is difficult to know exactly which industry will be the next to experience a similar change as advertisement industry. One reason is that AI is not an isolated technology, but affecting many other technologies that apply to different sectors with respective big data. In addition, there are all kinds of legal obstacles in many domains such as insurance, autonomous driving, privacy in health care and other fields.
Business model of AI development
Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says that the Business to Business model is the right strategy for the sustainable development of a commercial intelligence. He also thinks that AI may become increasingly B2C as the ultimate goal is reached, but for its development, B2B provides some of the greatest opportunities because certain large entities possess both interesting proprietary data sets and challenging real-world control problems useful to convincingly validate the progress of AI.
The future of AI and robots
Kids and even certain little animals are still smarter than the best self-learning robots right now. But Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says within not so many years, it will be possible to build an NN-based AI robot (an NNAI) that incrementally learns to become at least as smart as a little animal, that curiously, creatively and continually learn to plan, reason and decompose a wide variety of problems into quickly solvable (or solved) sub problems, in a very general way. Once animal-level AI has been achieved, the next step towards human-level AI may be small: it took billions of years to evolve smart animals, but only a few millions of years on top of that to evolve humans. Technological evolution is much faster than biological evolution, because dead ends are weeded out much faster. That is, once there is animal-level AI, a few years or decades later, human-level AI can be created, with truly limitless applications. At that time, "every business will change, all of civilization will change, and EVERYTHING will change" Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber concluded.
European academic labs still leads in AI R&D
Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says that the next breakthroughs in AI technologies in the coming decade are not easily predictable, otherwise they would not be breakthroughs. Nevertheless, most of the fundamental breakthroughs in AI and NNs research occurred in the previous millennium in small academic (often European) labs, not in companies. As Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber predicts, it will stay like that. However, big American and Chinese companies have excelled at scaling things up in ways impossible for academic labs, and to roll this out for billions of users.
The advantages of AI in China
Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says that he has observed rapid growth of AI-related sectors in China. There are outstanding talents, a lot of excitements about AI, deep learning and LSTM, and huge investments. He believes that China will play a very important role in the further development of AI. Meanwhile, he is sure that current development of AI is not a new bubble. On the contrary, it is only the beginning.
The authors, Ze Shi and Claudia (Xin) Li, are research fellows of Institute for Global Industry, Tsinghua University.
