The assistance of AI into our daily lives has only begun to scratch the surface.

AI Becoming Part of Everyday Life

Do you sense it yet? Can you hear it? Or feel it? Or are you already part of it? The “it” I’m speaking of is the AI world that is coming to life all around you on a daily basis.

With quantum computers right on the edge of being practical, will there be anything we won’t be able to fix, create or solve? Here are a few examples of how the world in which we currently reside will become something more like a magical land. Even Bill Gates said recently that with AI, we can all expect to take longer vacations!

Orion: Navigational Timesaver

UPS joins the AI movement with ORION.

UPS successfully started one of the major projects using AI. In the last decade UPS been rolling out a system called ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a kind of algorithmic “overmind” that knows better than any human how drivers ought to plan their routes.

It’s claimed that if they shave just 1 mile of each driver’s route daily, it adds up to a $50 million savings for the company. To paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirkson, “every year that much money saved will add up to some serious coin before long.” It took UPS almost a decade to design and build ORION and they won’t say how much it cost in total. However, they said rest assured, we made a good investment.

And not only is AI great when pulling a nine to five. It actually works 24/7/365. But all work and no play makes AI a dull boy. So those clever folks at Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department have developed an AI that recently beat the pants off of some professional poker players in the game called Texas Hold-em. Even though poker is what they call an “imperfect information” game, that didn’t give their AI one bit of trouble. If fact, it taught it self to bluff, too. In a 20-day long tournament with $200,000 in cash on the line and 120,000 hands played, the Mellon AI cleaned up over the human players.

In almost every field, 2017 was a great year for AI

So whether you are in agriculture, security,medicine, finance or even the legal profession, AI is changing the way things were and creating the way things will be, very soon.

For example, using AI to detect crop disease by a photo, uploaded from the field the farmer is actually standing in. Or using pesticide or controlling irrigation with pinpoint accuracy. Think of the savings.

                                                                                      Graphic Via Mater Private

In medicine, AI has already begun a huge revolution in how medicine is taught, or how it assists surgeons in the operating theater. Hell, in some cases robots and AI are actually doing parts of the surgery. AI is doing a far better job at identifying cancer cells on tissue slides than their human counterparts. And that really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to advancements in medicine that AI is directly responsible for making. It’s now a fair question to ask which will come first, Singularity, when a machine thinks and performs exactly like a human, or, Immortality, when humans are interconnecting with computer chips to reach a state of eternal life possibility. With AI providing the ultimate answers to stopping aging, disease, and possibly combining humans with machines, in a very sci-fi- kind of future can be predicted.

The pathway civilization follows has been perilous throughout history. The AI pathway will take us to the summits of intellectual mountains we never dreamed we could conquer. Put on your best pair of walking boots, grab some water, and take that climb with us. You won’t be disappointed.