Google AI Guru Sees Phones Getting Much Smarter

In AI circles, Peter Norvig is pretty easy to spot - he favours loud Hawaiian shirts and has shocking white hair.  In a recent interview with Wired, Norvig commented on the future of artificial intelligence.   Google’s director of research, says artificial intelligence is already here. On the plus side, Norvig, who teaches AI at Stanford University and is the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition), argues that robots are helping us, rather than trying to destroy us.

According to Norvig:

Behind the scenes, machines are doing so much. Every time you buy something with a credit card, there are AI programs trying to detect whether this is fraud or not. And that just goes on. It’s everywhere. In the last 20 years the idea of what AI is seems to have changed. Now it’s much more embedded and is everywhere. In the movie 2001, the idea was that AI was one big machine. Now, we think of it more as something that you hold in your hand than something that fills a room. It’s embedded everywhere, and it’s there not to reason and do everything by itself, but rather to help you do what you want to do.

A lot of [AI] is around mobile technology. You've got microphones and cameras out there, so we’re interacting with the world in terms of these rich types of data. That data is harder to understand, it’s analogue rather than digital. 

You’ll see better integration in terms of things always being with you: maybe you’ll be wearing a Bluetooth headpiece, or you’ll have a display in your glasses, and there will be reminders all the time, like, “Hey, this person walking up to you, this is their name, you met him three years ago and this is what you talked about.” And you can look like you know what you’re saying.

An earlier talk by Peter Norvig at the Singularity Summit (2007):

Peter Norvig at Singularity Summit 2007 from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

Wired.com: