What do you think Apple will be like in 10 years? What do you think are the best investments Apple could make in its future? What are your thoughts?
In my opinion their best bet would be artificial intelligence. If anything is going to be a watershed breakthrough in the next 10 years it's going to be AI. It sounds ridiculous, sure, but this is the future of tech. And I'm not talking about anything like Siri. I'm talking about true AI, a sentient entity you can talk to, something that knows you well and can anticipate your very thoughts. Siri will look like an antiquated typewriter compared to the kind of hard AI that will be produced in the near future. It will be so revolutionary that most people can't even imagine it's capabilities today. I'm not talking about something like the AI from Ex Machina or the film Her, those films haven't even scratched the surface of what is really possible in a good AI.
The possibilities are truly endless. It won't even be limited to an assistant like Siri, imagine having a neural network process real-time audio from your iPhone. It could analyze audio from the microphone of your phone and remember every word you hear. Imagine being able to ask your phone 'What was it Bill said about X last March' and having your phone give you a perfect recall of events. Or imagine you're visiting a foreign country and you want to have a conversation in another language. Instead of performing a raw text-translation, your AI could listen to the conversation, and in real-time it could analyze the emotion of a conversation, vocal patterns, colloquialisms, etc. and give you a near-perfect translation instead of a dumb text-lookup translation.
Imagine telling your phone 'Call Bill and ask if he wants to have dinner at X tomorrow'. Your AI would make the phone call, and would then not only tell you what his response was, but what his emotional response was, whether he sounded happy or concerned, etc. The AI could even guess as to why people feel a certain way by recalling conversations that took place in the past. An AI with a neural network powering it could look for patterns in your speech, your movements, etc. to guess how you are feeling, and it could work with smart accessories in your house to, for example, lower the lighting in your room if it knows you have a headache. It could even analyze your movement, health measurements, etc. to alert you to any potential health problems you might want to look in to.
Some people would become highly attached to their AI, others would barely use it at all, everyone is different. But a true AI would be so incredibly useful, entertaining, friendly, intelligent, that most people would come to absolutely depend on it. An AI could detect if you are feeling worried about something, and quietly begin doing research to learn more about the issue and how to give you good advice.
Not only do I think that Apple should go 'all in' on AI, I think they should be investing tens of billions of dollars in it, because AI is the future. If Apple doesn't want Google to beat them to the punch, they should start investing with IBM to further develop in its TrueNorth chips. I envision large data centers, not filled with traditional hard drives and Xeon processors, but instead filled with rack upon rack of neural network processors. Google's biggest advantage is the massive amount of data it already has about people. But Apple could also get huge amounts of information about people without necessarily violating their privacy.
AI is doubtlessly the 'next big thing' and it has the potential to revolutionize human life as we know it. Apple shouldn't surrender this promising area to Google.
In my opinion their best bet would be artificial intelligence. If anything is going to be a watershed breakthrough in the next 10 years it's going to be AI. It sounds ridiculous, sure, but this is the future of tech. And I'm not talking about anything like Siri. I'm talking about true AI, a sentient entity you can talk to, something that knows you well and can anticipate your very thoughts. Siri will look like an antiquated typewriter compared to the kind of hard AI that will be produced in the near future. It will be so revolutionary that most people can't even imagine it's capabilities today. I'm not talking about something like the AI from Ex Machina or the film Her, those films haven't even scratched the surface of what is really possible in a good AI.
The possibilities are truly endless. It won't even be limited to an assistant like Siri, imagine having a neural network process real-time audio from your iPhone. It could analyze audio from the microphone of your phone and remember every word you hear. Imagine being able to ask your phone 'What was it Bill said about X last March' and having your phone give you a perfect recall of events. Or imagine you're visiting a foreign country and you want to have a conversation in another language. Instead of performing a raw text-translation, your AI could listen to the conversation, and in real-time it could analyze the emotion of a conversation, vocal patterns, colloquialisms, etc. and give you a near-perfect translation instead of a dumb text-lookup translation.
Imagine telling your phone 'Call Bill and ask if he wants to have dinner at X tomorrow'. Your AI would make the phone call, and would then not only tell you what his response was, but what his emotional response was, whether he sounded happy or concerned, etc. The AI could even guess as to why people feel a certain way by recalling conversations that took place in the past. An AI with a neural network powering it could look for patterns in your speech, your movements, etc. to guess how you are feeling, and it could work with smart accessories in your house to, for example, lower the lighting in your room if it knows you have a headache. It could even analyze your movement, health measurements, etc. to alert you to any potential health problems you might want to look in to.
Some people would become highly attached to their AI, others would barely use it at all, everyone is different. But a true AI would be so incredibly useful, entertaining, friendly, intelligent, that most people would come to absolutely depend on it. An AI could detect if you are feeling worried about something, and quietly begin doing research to learn more about the issue and how to give you good advice.
Not only do I think that Apple should go 'all in' on AI, I think they should be investing tens of billions of dollars in it, because AI is the future. If Apple doesn't want Google to beat them to the punch, they should start investing with IBM to further develop in its TrueNorth chips. I envision large data centers, not filled with traditional hard drives and Xeon processors, but instead filled with rack upon rack of neural network processors. Google's biggest advantage is the massive amount of data it already has about people. But Apple could also get huge amounts of information about people without necessarily violating their privacy.
AI is doubtlessly the 'next big thing' and it has the potential to revolutionize human life as we know it. Apple shouldn't surrender this promising area to Google.
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