Surpassing the Tipping Point: Artificial Intelligence
In world that has been nurtured and altered by technology, people are motivated and intent on creating even more innovative and interactive technologies. Today, the focus of the next big thing in technology is artificial intelligence. With technical companies already successfully advancing the human experience through augmented and virtual reality, the concept of artificial intelligence has become ever more popular. Although people might argue that artificial intelligence is only a fad that will become less popular over time, the concept has finally reached its tipping point and is projected to succeed in the long run and become more popular as more technology companies develop the concept. The tipping point of a company or product is always a crucial point that most products fail to reach due to a lack of interest in the market audience. Most products fail due to the fact that it fails to surpass its tipping point and becomes less popular over time after the initial excitement created by the initial presence of the product in the market. In the case of artificial intelligence, people are becoming accustomed to physically interacting with the technology they use every day. Furthermore, this past June, the World Economic Forum regarded artificial intelligence as one of its top ten emerging technologies for 2016. The popularity of artificial intelligence has reached its tipping point and is projected to become more popular over time due the technologies’ immense capabilities in changing the way people work, play, and communicate.
In a report published by Stanford University’s “One Hundred Year Study of AI,” the status of AI’s progress is comprehensively discussed and the technical and societal opportunities are noted. The study of network effects allows those who are looking to market a novel technology to catch a glimpse of how the public will react to the product. With AI, the network effect is extremely positive with fantastic predictions for how AI’s long term goals meet society’s needs to live in a better and more functional world. With technologies such as IBM’s Deep Blue and Google’s AlphaGo, popularity has increased immensely regarding AI products and services. This popularity is reported to increase over time and the excitement is unlikely to die out due to the advances that AI has already made. In addition, the study done by Stanford University includes how “in the coming years, new perception/object recognition capabilities and robotic platforms that are human-safe will grow, as will data-driven products and their markets.” Evidently, not only will AI technologies grow more popular over time, but the technology market will also prosper and grow with AI. Going forward, AI will converge to an increasingly large market audience and will change the way people interact, communicate, and live altogether.
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/10/28/has-ai-finally-reached-a-tipping-point/