across these domains, as do the opportunities for transforming people’s lives
and the challenges posed in each domain. Moreover, the challenges so identified ranged across the full spectrum of
computer science, from hardware to
human-computer interaction. For instance, improvements in safe, reliable
hardware were determined to be essential for progress in transportation and
home-service robots. Autonomous
transportation, which the report projects, may “soon be commonplace,” is
among today’s most visible AI applications; in addition to changing individuals’ driving needs, it is expected to affect
transportation infrastructure, urban organization, and jobs. Experience with
home-service robots illustrates the key
role of hardware. Although robotic vacuum cleaners have been in home use for
years, technical constraints and the high
cost of reliable mechanical devices has
limited commercial opportunities to
narrowly defined applications; the report projects they will do so for the foreseeable future. For healthcare, the challenges so highlighted include
developing mechanisms for sharing
data, removing policy, regulatory, and
commercial obstacles, and enhancing
the ability of systems to work naturally
with care providers, patients, and patients’ families. The report also identifies capabilities for fluent interactions
and effective partnering with people as
key to achieving the promise of AI technologies for enhancing education. Major challenges toward realizing the potential of AI to address the needs of
low-resource communities include design of methods to cooperate with agencies and organizations working in those
communities and the development of
trust of AI technologies by these groups
and by the communities they serve. Such
challenges also arise in public safety and
security. In the domain of employment
and the workplace, while noting that AI-capable systems will replace people in
some kinds of jobs, the report also predicts AI capabilities are more likely to
change jobs by replacing tasks than by
eliminating jobs. It highlights the role of
social and political decisions in approaching a range of societal challenges
that will arise as work evolves in response to AI technologies and argues
these challenges should be addressed
immediately.
2017 International Joint Conferences on
Artificial Intelligence, the study panel
identified the main messages of the report, to appear as callouts in the margins of the report.
The Report
The report aims to address multiple audiences, ranging from general public to
AI researchers and practitioners, and
thus to be both accessible and provide
depth. As a result, it has a three-part
hierarchical structure: executive summary, more expansive five-page overview
summarizing the core of the report, and
a core with further details. The core examines eight “domains” of typical urban settings on which AI is likely to have
impact over the coming years: transportation, home and service robots,
healthcare, education, public safety and
security, low-resource communities,
employment and workplace, and entertainment. The authors deliberately did
not give much weight to positions they
considered excessively optimistic or pessimistic, despite the prevalence of such
positions in the popular press, as they
intended the report to provide a sober
assessment by the people at the heart of
technological developments in AI.
For each domain the study panel investigated, the report looks back to 2000
to summarize the AI-enabled changes
that have already occurred and then
project forward through 2030. It identifies the availability of large amounts of
data, including speech and geospatial
data, as well as cloud computing resources and progress in hardware technology for sensing and perception, as
contributing to recent advances in AI
research and to the success of deployed
AI-enabled systems. Advances in machine learning, fueled in part by these
resources, as well as by development of
“deep” artificial neural nets, have played
a key role in enabling these achievements. The goal of the study panel’s
forward-looking assessment, which we
summarize briefly, was to call attention
to the opportunities the study panel anticipated for AI technologies to improve
societal conditions, lower the barriers to
realizing this potential, and address the
realistic risks it likewise anticipated in
applying AI technologies in the domains
it studied.
The projected time horizons for AI-enabled systems to enter daily life vary
It aspires to replace
conceptions rooted
in science fiction
novels and movies
with a realistic
foundation for these
deliberations.