Stephen Hawking said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Ever since its genesis, there have been conflicting views and concerns on the potential enhancement or doom that it can cause to human civilization. While some experts believe that this technology will advance and augment our intelligence, some like Bill Gates have expressed concerns on how a machine’s intelligence becomes strong enough to be a concern.

For now, let’s take a look at the current trends of Artificial Intelligence and where it is headed to in 2018:

Artificial Intelligence to fully integrate with human lives

If 2017 was the year where the warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about the potential evil from AI clashed with predictions from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates on its potential good, 2018 will be the year when the debate shifts to its practical utility.

We would get to see more robots that could master complex tasks like ‘walking around a room and over objects’. 2018 will see “Vast applications on smartphones will run deep neural networks to enable AI,” as said by Robinson Piramuthu, chief scientist for computer vision, eBay.

Google CEO Sunder Pichai has said that the future of search giant Google is AI. Pichai has already made a conceptual shift from ‘mobile first’ to ‘artificial intelligence first’ laying full emphasis on machine learning and voice recognition in 2018.

More research on AI and demand for AI experts to increase in 2018

From 2018 and beyond, there would certainly be more people from all kinds of backgrounds who would participate in building, developing and productizing Artificial Intelligence.

There would be more product usage, creating apps, translating data and algorithms into real-world usage. As per reports, linguists, data scientists, UX experts, cognitive programmers would massively scale-up.

Rise of Capsule Networks and AI content creation

2018 would see more use of converting structured data into intelligent narratives based on natural language generation (NLG) and natural language processing (NLP). AI would see more use in automated content generation in news coverage, sports, financial reports, and social media and so on using rule-based systems.

There would be more use of capsule networks accounts (CapsNet) for image recognition and computer vision. (Read more here: PDF)

More use of smart automation and chat boxes

In 2018, advanced AI is predicted to make more accurate, more instant verbal and visual translations. It is estimated that some 85% of customer interactions will be managed by AI by 2020.

The trend indicates more focus on bot sensitivity training that would divest more work on chatbot shoulders like Amazon’s Alexa or “Amy” the new virtual assistant from X.ai for responding regarding meals, meetings and calls without indicating that she’s a bot.

Rise of bots and conversational AI

More efficacies in conversational AI are likely to increase in 2018 as Forbes has highlighted well here.

Trends show that there would be more research on emotional sensitivity and translational technology in AI. Amazon has gone a step ahead in training Alexa to recognize speech patterns that may be indicative of suicide. This could well be a future promise of using bots effectively for psychiatric counseling.

AI and machine empathy

“Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver,” Diane Ackerman. With main advances in the last six decades in search algorithms, 2018 would see more research on the ability of robots to empathise.

AI in medicine and clinical system

By the end of next year, it is expected that half of leading healthcare systems will have adopted some form of AI within their diagnostic groups.

“AI in 2018 and in the coming years will be so embedded into our clinical systems that it will no longer be called AI but rather just a regular system,” Luciano Prevedello, M.D., M.P.H., Radiology & Neuroradiology, Ohio State University Wexler Medical Center.

AI to scale up marketing and sales in B2B companies

Enterprises are likely to scale up excellence AI to deal with more complex IT ecosystems. Marketing companies would put AI to best use for original gathering of information of lead generation and making predictive account management and sales.

AI is likely to open up new scope of research in astrophysics and energy

AI is expected to revolutionize the energy industry. Experts predict that Artificial Intelligence will enable the detection of an unexpected astrophysical event that emits gravitational waves, opening a new field of research in contemporary astrophysics.

For now there isn’t a foolproof mechanism to predict whether it is a fail-safe mechanism designed to enhance human survival or can cause human destruction. It is only the future which would clear up all speculations.

(This article was first published by the author on Medium)