What we’ve seen of AI so far is only the leading edge of the evolution to come.
- Mateja Jamnik, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Beth Singler and Adrian Weller
AI systems are now used in everything from the trading of stocks to the setting of house prices; from detecting fraud to translating between languages; from creating our weekly shopping lists to predicting which movies we might enjoy.
This is just the beginning. Soon, AI will be used to advance our understanding of human health through analysis of large datasets, help us discover new drugs and personalise treatments. Self-driving vehicles will transform transportation and allow new paradigms in urban planning. Machines will run our homes more efficiently, make businesses more productive and help predict risks to society.
While some AI systems will outperform human intelligence to augment human decision making, others will carry out repetitive, manual and dangerous tasks to augment human labour. Many of the greatest challenges we face, from understanding and mitigating climate change to quickly identifying and containing disease outbreaks, will be aided by the tools of AI.
What we’ve seen of AI so far is only the leading edge of the evolution to come.
Yet the idea of creating machines that think and learn like humans has been around since the 1950s. Why is AI such a hot topic now? And what does Cambridge have to offer?
Three major advances are enabling huge progress in AI research: the availability of masses of data generated by all of us all the time; the power and processing speeds of today’s supercomputers; and the advances that have been made in mathematics and computer science to create sophisticated algorithms that help machines learn.
Image credit: Jonathan Settle / University of Cambridge
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge