Trends - 2020 and Beyond

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere; improves, disturbs or distresses, your life day and night; is a very large business today and has enormous growth potential; and it's not going away. This section looks at what some of the near future trends and growth areas are reasonably predictable. Because AI is a highly innovative technology and capable of inventing or suggesting unimaginable things all by itself, these predictions may or may not become reality.

The need for people in the job market with AI skills will grow and they will become increasingly scarce. AI teams will not only need software developers and engineers, but should also include business experts, statisticians and, hopefully, someone with knowledge of the many facets of ethical awareness and data privacy.

The ecosystem for AI development will grow increasingly open-sourced, meaning that anyone can use the algorithms and suggest changes. The most important aspect of this trend is the effect it will have on the construction of ethical and understandable algorithms. From the AI development viewpoint, open-source software will also speed up AI development, distribution, and operation of business and consumer applications.

Individual and media trust in AI is absolutely essential to its growth. Trust in AI is gradually increasing, largely due to the growth of AI devices in our homes that people trust with running various aspects of their lives. As this trust grows, AI ethics become more important to a larger group of society which forms a basis for government regulation to control and protect the AI user.

AI will become more ubiquitous - in boring terminology - more of the same with increased capabilities, in more places. Home devices and personal assistants will become smarter, integrated into new devices and hubs, and have greater ability to act for and communicate with humans. The same holds true for the business environment as computing power increases and more and better AI software is designed to take advantage. Cybersecurity may have the largest breakthrough using AI technology to counter growing threats. But what may be the most interesting trend occurs between the individually advancing but increasingly overlapping technologies - AI, IoT, blockchain, robotics, 5G Internet, and quantum computing.