1. Enabling Human Progress
Speeding Drug Discovery
Failing fast is crucial in high-stakes research. Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping pharma do it, supercharging the trial-and-error process so scientists can home in on the answers they need. Machine learning apps are crunching oceans of data at speed and simulating the interactions within the body of billions of molecules both existing and theoretical. In the process, they’re revealing complex patterns that can guide researchers. The result: Novel drug development is twice as fast as it was before the advent of AI.
Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) tech integrates the human brain into a digital—and specifically AI-powered—network, making it possible for neural signals to trigger physical-world events. Existing applications include tech that will adjust a home’s HVAC system when a resident’s brain signals too cold and move a cursor via a stimulus that beams from synapse to laptop. BCI represents another stride toward the human goal of controlling our environments, so we can live better lives within them.
Connecting The Human Brain
AI has perfected the closed captioning that makes visual media accessible to those with hearing impairments and given rise to obstacle identification, verbal face recognition and scenery identification apps to assist the visually impaired. For those living with paralysis, algorithms interpret the brain’s electrical signals, then detour them around damaged neural matter via surgically inserted interfaces so they can activate otherwise inaccessible nerves and make muscles move.
Helping People With Disabilities
Expert Perspectives
Democratized tech, early cancer detection and new control over agriculture are among the benefits of an AI age.
Will AI put us all out of work? No, but AI will spark creativity, as machines, by relieving us of dull labor, let us concentrate on the things they can’t do: think outside boxes, make imaginative connections, synthesize new knowledge. This will inject new life into the economy. But it will also redefine what an economy is: no longer just a mechanism for the creation of wealth but also a supportive matrix that nurtures what’s most human in each of us.
Eliminating Rote Tasks To Spur Creativity
Digital onboarding, real-time transcription, customer service chatbots, basic content production—these are some of the many things AI is making possible at the office. The results are higher productivity and retention, with the financial benefits they bring. Organizations continue to invest in AI to support the platforms necessary for hybrid work, but the stakes are greater than just hybrid. In the future, work will evolve in tandem with AI. And as organizations become more efficient, the four-day work week becomes more popular.
Forging The Future Of Work
The information that today’s organizations produce in galaxy-sized quantities can help employees better work and collaborate—when they can access it. But often they can’t: Information can sprawl across platforms, hide within silos and pile in heaps in the cloud. Enter AI-enabled knowledge management (KM) tech, which gives employees a shared base of easily searched, curated information that provides accurate answers to customer questions, for example, or leverages findings from other teams so mistakes don’t repeat. KM mitigates a liability of the information age—to the benefit of the bottom line.
Revolutionizing Knowledge Management
2. Driving Our Economies
A loud crack rings out on a city street. Is it a gunshot, a firecracker, a clap of thunder? In smart cities, a sensor embedded in a lamppost can convey the noise to a cloud AI engine that arrives at conclusions—and then, if necessary, dispatches first responders, beaming info about the incident to their phones. AI-enabled predictive modeling, meanwhile, is helping experts take steps to get ahead of natural disasters, like rigging warning systems and planning evacuation routes.
Ensuring Public Safety
AI-enabled transport is, for many, about autonomous vehicles. They’ll make roads safer and commutes pleasant while transforming our geographies (always-on shared cars don’t require parking lots). Elsewhere, AI-powered verification systems will speed airport security lines even as logistical AI shortens layovers by accelerating airplane refueling and restocking. Predictive maintenance will cut freight train and truck downtime, while AI-supported Internet of Things applications will let mass transit systems adjust resources and schedules in response to demand.
Writing A New Chapter In Transport
What are the tenets of ethical AI? One is transparency: AI applications must avoid functioning as “black boxes,” generating results under the cover of obscurity. The details of the algorithms that drive them must be democratically accessible. Another is equity: AI must generate positive outcomes for all, not just an elite few. A third is privacy: In a networked world, AI must protect our right to this fundamental value, never subvert it.
Conceiving Responsible AI
3. Enhancing The Social Sphere
A worldwide regulatory and ethical structure is evolving to ensure that AI develops as an unambiguous social good.
Expert Perspectives
For more on how AI is driving progress,
watch the full video from NTT DATA and Forbes’ March 15, 2022 expert panel discussion.
As AI achieves penetration, the “dull” job will vanish and knowledge workers will see stunning productivity gains.
Expert Perspectives