Artificial intelligence gradually enters daily life

Mark Zuckerberg leads this business trend that breaks science fiction clichés

     The creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, plans to install an artificial intelligence system to control his house in the style of the film Jarvis of Iron Man, but even for ordinary people this is no longer a matter of science fiction.

Zuckerberg is perhaps the most reputable figure of those who support this trend, but it is certainly not the only one. "2016 was the year in which we became aware, and consumers were shown the idea of ​​artificial intelligence more oriented towards the mass market," Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies, said in a recent interview.

   Milanesi illustrated this potential market by recalling the device with Echo voice command, devised by Amazon, which includes an assistant called Alexa and who is able to answer questions or give orders to other objects connected in the house.

In the same way is located the specialized company Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), because it estimates that there has been "a dramatic increase" this year in the interest of consumers towards these devices, which have sold more than five million of units in the United States since the end of 2014, in a market that rival Google Home joined in the autumn.

Artificial intelligence began to enrich in parallel products that use a public not so restricted, such as the new Google instant messaging known as Allo, which suggests answers, or the proposal of the best meeting point between a driver and his passenger in the application Uber mobile.

The automakers have accelerated the pace to offer for sale autonomous automobiles, whose driving will also be done with artificial intelligence. This technology will also be applied in supermarkets to automatically identify the contents of carts without the need for ATMs, a novelty recently introduced by Amazon.

«Smart machines will be ubiquitous»

Alexandre Alahi, a researcher in artificial intelligence laboratories at Stanford University, anticipates a future "in which intelligent machines will be omnipresent in our daily lives, we will have robots in the houses, in the streets with autonomous cars, but also in stations, hospitals and the city in general ", to help blind people who move. "Our homes, public spaces will become smart to increase our security, our health, our productivity, etc.," explained Alahi.

Sensor systems, capable of seeing and learning like humans thanks to algorithms and a computer calculation capacity that analyzes huge amounts of data very quickly, could, for example, replace the supervision of a doctor 24 hours a day in rooms of hospitals and allow older people to remain in their homes, or reduce congestion at service stations during peak hours.

The IBM Watson computer system currently helps genomic medicine specialists accelerate DNA analysis and determine personalized treatments for cancer patients. Even Google presented at the end of November an algorithm that detects signs of diabetic retinopathy in the eyes. Both Facebook and Microsoft this year presented systems "capable of looking" at the images and describing content for the blind.

AlphaGo wins games for world champions

The machines conquered in March the complex game of oriental origin 'go', in which qualities normally restricted to humans, such as intuition and creativity, are considered essential. The algorithms of AlphaGo, created by a subsidiary of Google, won 4-1 to the champion of the South Korean world.

Huge progress has been made with "results close to human performance" with the recognition of the content of the images, but there is still a lot of work to develop in parallel "a social intelligence", clarifies Alexandre Alahi, who works on this issue in the field of systems Of transport.

Thus, an autonomous car circulates without problem in a very structured city like Mountain View, in Santa Clara, California, where Google has its headquarters, but "can not do the Arc de Triomphe tour" in Paris, where the climate is less controlled and the displacements of other vehicles, less predictable.

"There are situations where technology can not effectively read the behavior of people," explained the researcher, then we must find means to understand and respond to social conversations to "coexist with humans within the same spaces."

Artificial intelligence is a source of inspiration but also of fear, as reflected in a series of initiatives by researchers and companies that aim to ensure that the impact is positive for society and want to avoid detours towards the protagonists of the Terminator saga.

"If you think about it now, it frightens you, but it's still going to be years" for technology to reach its full potential, which will be incorporated into daily life gradually, in stages, relativized Milanesi.