Investors bank on staying ahead of the curve, and it’s been said that there’s a very thin line between genius and madness. That machines should surpass humans in the high-level information processing that is our species’ forte seems madness of the highest order, but the facts are crystallizing and the balance is tipping towards “genius.”
According to Goldman Sachs, artificial intelligence is “on the cusp of a period of more rapid growth in its use and applications.” Investors sure seem to think so. Expect Labs, which raised 13 million last December, is part of a 2014 trend that saw funding for artificial intelligence startups jump a remarkable 302%. To put that in perspective, investments in the mobile sector saw a 488% increase after the release of the first generation iPhone, and A.I. investments at this point are largely anticipatory: no one knows where this technology is going to lead, only that we’re at the start of something very, very big. IBM alone invested $1 billion in the Watson Group, devoted to developing and commercializing the technologies that made their “Jeopardy” bot famous, but every major tech company is making moves on this space, with a major tech company making a new A.I. acquisition multiple times a month.
You even have Elon Musk donating $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, for the creation of a grant program to keep A.I. from turning evil. Deep learning engineer Andrew Ng compared this concern to worrying about overpopulation on Mars (being so distant that it’s impractical to strategize about), but it does show Musk’s faith – shared by many – that this space will continue to advance faster than anyone can predict.
