IN 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Jeff Bezos. Thirumalai, a computer scientist who’d left IBM in 2005 to head Amazon’s recommendations team, had come to propose a sweeping new plan for incorporating the latest advances in artificial intelligence into his division.
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It sounds like a case of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. Two world-beating computers, each programmed in a different way, take each other on at chess.
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THE past decade has seen the smartphone become a portal for managing daily life. Consumers use their pocket computers to bank, buy and befriend.
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NO WONDER they are called “patients”. When people enter the health-care systems of rich countries, they know what they will get: prodding doctors, endless tests, baffling jargon, rising costs and long waits.
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Talking to a computer can feel liberating — as anyone who received an Amazon Alexa or Google Home device for Christmas can attest — but only until you ask the wrong question and the machine plays dumb.
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Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, accounting for $10 trillion annually, about 13 percent of global GDP.
But while productivity in adjacent industries like petroleum and mining has skyrocketed with the advent of new technologies, productivity in the construction sector has remained flat.
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IN AMERICA, computers have been used to assist bail and sentencing decisions for years.
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WHEN the electronics industry meets in Las Vegas at CES, its main trade show, buzzwords abound. But rarely has one been as pervasive as this week.
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DIGITAL assistants such as Siri and Cortana are increasingly common on phones and computers. Most are designed to give their users the impression that a humanlike intelligence lies behind the program’s friendly voice.
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FOR ALL THE hype about killer robots, 2017 saw some notable strides in artificial intelligence. A bot called Libratus out-bluffed poker kingpins, for example.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE USED to mean something. Now, everything has AI. That app that delivers you late-night egg rolls? AI.
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