Book Review: Own the A.I. Revolution by Mike Ashley and Neil Sahota
By: Ibn Mujeer
Tags: Books, Robotics, Future, Book Review, Artificial Intelligence

This book serves as a fantastic intro to AI and the impact it has had and will continue to have on our society. Neil Sahota did a fantastic job of making a topic as complex as AI, simple and engaging for even the most novice of readers interested in this exciting industry.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is on the verge of disrupting every domain of human existence. What does that mean for your business? Everything. Building on the power of A.I. is the factor that will determine success or failure in the very near future — and this in-depth guide from the man who designed the A.I. system that famously won Jeopardy provides everything you need to be a leader in this revolution.

Imagine if computers could do any of the following tasks they listed:

Review a patient’s medical tests and instantly produce an accurate diagnosis

Serve as “eyes” for the blind and vision-impaired

Act as a personal therapist, demonstrating all the emotional intelligence of a trained psychologist

Accurately translate meaning between multiple languages in real-time

Provide expert legal advice in seconds

Serve as a digital personal assistant, doing everything from booking theater tickets to cooking meals based on voice commands

Accurately predict stock market activity based on the sociopolitical zeitgeist

Find your perfect mate

Well, all these services are available right now thanks to A.I.

Here’s a current example feasible today. Which is noted in the book.

“Let’s assume you’re the owner of a food truck. Instead of relying on what your competitors have done in the past or on well-intentioned friends’ advice, you could gain insight from an A.I. It can suggest where to park your truck, how many tacos might sell in a given period, and how many ingredients you should order, saving you money on inventory and crucial preparation time. Cognizant of local foot traffic, the A.I. can also tell you the optimal time to intercept people coming out of a particular bar, especially if there’s an event going on. It might say, “If you set up at this location from 1:00 to 1:30, you can sell more shrimp tacos at a 10 percent premium.” Likewise, by scanning news sites and Twitter feeds, the A.I. can alert you to the fact that a convention of vegetarian aficionados will be emerging onto the street at 5 p.m. giving you ample time to prep your mouth-watering green chile and cheese tamales.”

McKinsey and Company reported that 58 percent of all jobs could be automated today if necessary. “There’s a famous study by Frey and Osborne out of Oxford listing 72 occupations ripe for automation”.

A.I. is advancing the way we create energy, for example, the capacity to deliver solar energy is doubling every 18 months in the same way Moore’s Law predicted the doubling of computer power every 2 years. At the current rate, in a few decades, we’re going to have so much energy we won’t know what to do with it. Like photos, energy will be essentially free.

Let’s look at the advancement of our educational system. Here’s the book’s prediction on how our education process will be in the next 10 years: The teaching will be much more personalized instead of a one-to-many model where a teacher broadcasts information. A.I. will personalize individualized learning in which machines can assist in curating custom-tailored learning to many students remotely.

Machines will recognize and interpret student’s emotions and apply that to support the individual’s learning experience. The process of proof of learning and assessment of the learning process will be real-time. While learning happens everywhere — in school, online, in libraries, in parks — we’re currently not capturing learning outside of the formal setting. With A.I. and other tools we should be able to capture learning where it happens, assess it, and document it.

Hangzhou’s FlyZoo Hotel in China is already fully automated. It uses robots and A.I. systems to service their guests without human contact whatsoever. At this luxury resort, visitors can check in with the help of facial recognition technology and dine on food delivered by robots. In fact, robots make up much of the “staff.” Instead of human servers, robots work in the restaurant and at the bar. Even the rooms possess their own robot butler called “Tmall Elf” capable of providing for nearly every need.

In Saudi Arabia, they are developing a city that will span 10,000 square miles along the Red Sea coastline. Bloomberg News described it as “the city of the future that was built from scratch that will be bigger than Dubai and have more robots than humans.”

You can get your copy from here.