What do the next 20 years hold for artificial intelligence

The year is 2031. An outbreak of a highly contagious mosquito-borne virus in the U.S. has spread quickly to major cities around the world. It’s all hands on deck to stop the disease from spreading–and that includes the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which scour online news and social media for relevant data and patterns. Working with these results, and data gathered from numerous hospitals around the world, scientists discover an interesting link to a rare neurological condition and a treatment is developed. Within days, the disease is under control. It’s not hard to imagine this scenario*—but whether future AI systems will be competent enough to do the job depends in large part on how we tackle AI development today. That’s according to a new 20-year Artificial Intelligence Roadmap co-authored by Yolanda Gil, a USC computer science research professor and research director at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI), with computer science experts from universities across the U.S. Recently published by the Computing Community Consortium, funded by the National Science Foundation, the roadmap aims to identify challenges and opportunities in the AI landscape, and to inform future decisions, policies and investments in this area. As president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Gil co-chaired the roadmap with Bart Selman, a computer science professor at Cornell University. We spoke with Gil about what AI means today, what it will take to build more intelligent and competent AI in the future, and how to ensure AI operates safely as it approaches humans in its intelligence. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Why did you undertake the AI Roadmap effort with the Computing Community Consortium? We really wanted to highlight what it will take for AI systems to become more intelligent in the […]

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