You’ve heard of artificial intelligence — everyone from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t stop talking about it in 2017. But this year, AI will affect your life in tangible ways.
“I believe 2018 is the year that this will start to become mainstream, to begin to impact many aspects of our lives in a truly ubiquitous and meaningful way,” says Ralph Haupter, the president of Microsoft Asia.
The idea that computers have some amount of “intelligence” is not new, says Haupter, pointing as far back as 1950 when computer pioneer Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. “So it has taken nearly 70 years for the right combination of factors to come together to move AI from concept to an increasingly ubiquitous reality,” says Haupter.
Those factors are the mass distribution and use of Internet-connected devices, which generate massive quantities of data, and cloud computing and software algorithms that can recognize patterns within data, he says.
