On 20 September, journalist Maria Bartiromo published a very interesting article on online news site Fox Business in which she analyses the opinions of several experts regarding the effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our lives.

First, she explains how AI has grown in these last years. She mentioned the harsh competition between the US and China to become the world leader in this area, and how the Asian nation is winning the race. “In February the U.S. government launched an American AI initiative, which aims to stimulate AI development. The government’s investments in unclassified R&D for AI technologies is up 40 percent since 2015 and for the first time in history, President Trump’s fiscal year 2019 budget requests to designate AI and unmanned autonomous systems a priority”, the journalist say. “However, some say the problem is that China spends much more on AI investment and financing. In 2017, AI spending hit $39.5 billion, with China accounting for 70 percent of the expenditures”, she added.

According to the report, one of the areas in which AI is thriving is the health care industry, since “the AI health care market is expected to grow from $2.1 billion to $36.1 billion in 2025”. Regarding this, Ms Bartiromo quotes the opinion of IBM CEO Ginni Rometti, who explained how IBM’s AI computer Watson is now gathering information on diseases such as cancer or Parkinson’s. “We've been working away on Watson for health, and in particular, we worked on oncology. We're now at 300 hospitals in over a 125,000 patients around the world where AI has helped the doctor identify the diagnosis and the appropriate treatment”, Ms Rometti declared.

However, in spite of these advantages, Ms Bartiromo mentions the words of former Google China president, Kai-Fu Lee, who warned about the significant number of jobs that could be in risk because of AI. “Routine white-collar jobs like customer service, telemarketing, loan officers and tellers and jobs like that will be the first to be challenged. […]Then, repetitive blue-collar jobs like dishwasher, assembly line workers, and a little bit later, drivers, also will be challenged”, he affirmed.

Where is AI taking us? Only time will tell.

Draw your own conclusions…

For more information: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/artifical-intelligence-technology-robot