AI, New Electricity?

Broadly speaking, two spaces where seeing drastic growth and innovation are computer vision and natural language processing. The sharp advancements in computer vision are impacting multiple areas. Some of the most notable are cars getting to the point where they can drive themselves. 

    In healthcare, computer vision is now used to review different imaging modalities, such as x-rays and MRIs to diagnose illnesses. We're fast approaching the point where machines are doing as well, if not better than the medical experts.

    Similarly, natural language processing is booming with a vast improvements in 
ability to translate, determine sentiment, clustering of new articles, writing papers, and many others. Does this era of AI different? Main factors are bigger datasets. We now have larger and more diverse datasets than ever before. We talked about how ImageNet and how that was able to open up the opportunities to train models that need larger datasets to learn
complex patterns. 

     With the Cloud infrastructure now in place to store copious amounts of data for much cheaper, and the plethora of new ways to capture data are now able to build larger, more new once datasets to learn underlying patterns across a multitude of fields. We have faster computers. We now have access to powerful hardware for processing and storing data. The mainframe computers used to first drive the expert systems in the '80s costs about $200,000 a month. We can now get stronger and faster computers that sit on our laps. Neural networks have
finally taken off in the past decade and proven to be successful. We have had constant new
innovation in the area of deep learning leading to practical results within the industry. 

    All this is leading to cutting edge results in a variety of fields. So we can think about with our phones, how we're able to use our face to unlock our phones, how they recognize our voice, how it's able to look at pictures and identify pictures of us or our friends. We have stores where we can walk in and pick things up such as Amazon Go and not have to go to a checkout counter. We have our homes being powered by our voice telling it we want music played or for the lights to be
switched on or off. All of this has been driven by this current era in artificial intelligence.  industries now being heavily driven by AI to hopefully hit home for whatever industry
you're in and to show how AI is the new electricity being used across all industries. So within healthcare, as discussed, AI is now used to aid in medical imaging. Often computers are
able to diagnose as accurately or even more accurately than medical professionals. For drug discovery, a great example is Pfizer has turned to IBM Watson to leverage machine learning to power its drug discovery and search for immuno-oncology drugs. 

     Patient care is being driven by AI, as well as AI research within the healthcare industry and has helped advance sensory aids for the deaf, blind, and those that have lost limbs. In industrial, we are able to now automate factory work for efficiency and lower costs. We have the ability
to monitor for future system failures and schedule maintenance in advance, able to enhance and optimize agricultural production. Field automation is able to track our sales, inventory, and delivery needs at a much quicker pace. So for finance, we have algorithmic trading,
fraud detection, research, our personal finance, risk mitigation, all being driven by AI. For energy, it's being used to locate and extract oil and gas reserves. We have smart grids which
essentially are meant to optimize electrical grid for more efficient infrastructure. We're also able to improve overall operations within the industry and we also are learning to conserve energy using artificial intelligence. Within government, defense and identifying threats. 

Think about our cold war example and where we are today. Gaining insights for all major issues, whether they are threats from weather or pandemics, or simply gaining a better understanding of their citizens needs. We have a driving safety and security as they have more access to data from
both abroad and at home. It's able to enhance their engagement between government and citizens. It's aided in building smarter cities to optimize things such as traffic, healthcare, police
and fire protection, and the distribution of energy. Transportation, we have autonomous cars, automated trucking for deliveries. AI is huge in aerospace to optimize simulations, maintenance, and prototyping. It's able to come up with optimal routes and
timing for shipping. AI has helped in the search and rescue fields with drones now being
built up machine learning algorithms to help search and detect missing people
in areas that may be too dangerous to initially explore by humans, and so much more. We have personalized advertisements, personalized education, able to identify what a student
does and does not know, and develop a personalized curriculum accordingly. Gaming is able to leverage many of the latest advances in AI to make a more human-like
experience for players.

 Service industries are quickly able to automate many of their responses and reduce time and manpower needed to solve many common issues. For telco and media, we can think to how media is using AI to help consumers define the content that directly matches
their interests. In sports, advanced analytics are driving the ways in which general
managers recruit players, as well as optimizing ticket pricing and the
other business operations. So we see the extent to which AI is infiltrating all industries and why this era of AI is different than any other.