The proliferance of Artificial Intelligence has increased significantly over the recent years. With AI-related research and applications rapidly increasing, industries are inclining more towards the potential uses of AI. According to a report issued by venture capital corporation CB Insights in the US in 2016, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and other information technology giants have acquired over 140 entrepreneurial firms in the field of AI since 2011. This large number of mergers and acquisitions, along with the influx of capital are accelerating the development of AI technology.
The development of AI technology is further driven by research and the information environment. Although both factors are important, but the information environment has the stronger driving force. With the emergence of big data, increasing use of internet, rise of information community, the information environment surrounding AI has significantly changed. Furthermore, development of e-commerce, and interconnection and fusion of data and knowledge in society, physical space, and cyber space are also contributing to the change. This has led AI to a new evolutionary stage, viz Artificial Intelligence 2.0. In this article, we will look upon the emergence of AI 2.0 and dive into some important insights.
The External Dynamic Forces Promoting AI 2.0
The formation of AI 2.0 is promoted by several external forces. The concept of AI actually originated prominently from the changes in four areas as mentioned below.
- With the popularity of mobile terminals, internet, sensor networks, vehicular networking, and wearable devices, the information environment of the 21st century has changed profoundly. The sensing devices are extensively distributed throughout the cities, and the unprecedented rapid expansion of networks connecting individuals and groups throughout the world continues to reflect and aggregate demands, knowledge, and capabilities. Furthermore, world has evolved from a binary space – physics and human society or PH, to a ternary space – cyber, physics, and human society or CPH. These CPH interactions have formed new computing paradigms and have promoted the need of AI 2.0
- The AI research is shifting from being driven by academic curiosity to being driven by demands that are focused outside of academia. Moreover, as the social demands of AI are expanding rapidly, AI research is also undergoing swift changes. Moreover, the new goals and problems in intelligent cities, medicine, transportation, logistics, manufacturing, and smart products as well as driverless automobiles and smartphones, all require AI development, thus many enterprises are actively promoting new AI research.
- The goals of AI have also undergone major changes. AI has transformed from the pursuit of ‘using a computer to stimulate human intelligence’ to enhanced hybrid intelligence systems combining machines and humans, new crowd intelligence systems, and more complex intelligence systems, such as intelligent cities combining humans, societies, physics, and cyber systems.
- Lastly, the data resources related to AI are also changing. AI depends upon data-driven algorithms and gives rise to a new information environment. These calculations will be driven by an increasing amount of sensors and networks, big data, and cross media information. Thus, the development of AI related to these aspects, with a perceptive and fused intelligence is inevitable.
Newly Emerged Technologies Driving Artificial Intelligence 2.0
Several new technological advancements are also driving the development of Artificial Intelligence. Here are some of these technologies that are driving the AI 2.0.
- Internet Crowd Intelligence: The Internet Crowd Intelligence technologies have recently gained ground. A research divided the crowd into three types according to the difficulty level – crowdsourcing used to realize task allocation, complex workflows, and problem-solving ecosystems. The large scale crowd exhibits extraordinary intelligence capabilities through the participation and interaction of individuals on internet, which constitutes this new type of intelligence system. Internet Crowd Intelligence computing can greatly enhance the knowledge base available to human society, and has extensive and important applications as well.
- Autonomous Intelligent Systems: Robotics development has been a focused target since the birth of AI, with bionics as an important developmental direction. However, most bionic robots that were developed over the past 60 years have failed upon application. Advancements in developing automated intelligent mechanical equipment are more effective, easy, and economical. Thus, the autonomous-intelligent systems will be an important developmental direction for future generations of AI.
- Cross-media Intelligence: An important characteristic of human intelligence involves the comprehensive utilization of the information attained from various forms of perception, including vision, language, and auditory sense, to enable recognition, inference, design, creation, and prediction. Likewise, in 2013, a paper in Nature entitled “2020 Vision” discussed the term cross media as describing the integration of text, images, voice, and video. Cross-media intelligence represents a cornerstone of AI, in that it allows machines to recognize their external environment. Presently, it is in the early stages of its development, however, it is expected to form an important filed of AI in the near future.
- Human-machine Hybrid-augmented Intelligence: Human intelligence constitutes a form of natural biological intelligence that is different from that of AI. The simulation of human intelligence by computer is important; in contrast to such simulation, hybrid intelligence systems are formed by cooperation between computer and humans to form an augmented intelligence of “1+1>2.” Wearable devices, intelligent-hybrid vehicles, exoskeleton devices, and human-machine collaborative surgeries have been developed till date, suggesting that the human-machine hybrid-augmented intelligence system has vast potential for future development.
Artificial Intelligence 2.0: Salient Features
AI 2.0 is a new stage of AI research that is different from that of the past 60 years. It focuses on the current technological advances, with the goal of pursuing breakthroughs in AI by combining internal and external driving forces. Moreover, AI 2.0 will integrate natural intelligence and artificial intelligence to enhance human intellectual activity, and will be closely integrated into human life (cross-media and autonomous systems) to the point of being a part of human body (hybrid augmented intelligence).
Furthermore, it will be capable of reading, managing, and recombining human knowledge to make suggestions for social problems, including daily life, production, resource usage, and the environment. In the future, with assistance of AI 2.0, humans will be able to obtain better insight and effective management to interact with complex macroscopic systems including urban development, ecological protection, economic management, and financial risk. AI 2.0 will also be able to solve problems, such as medical treatment, product design, energy conservation, and safe driving.
To conclude, as the world moves rapidly towards the technological age, organizations will need to cope with the changing market scenario and for that, they will need to adopt the new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, etc. These technologies will surely help businesses survive and prosper in this new technology age.
