Hopes, Fears, and Predictions for AI 100 Years From Now
The year is 2118. There are now more robots than there are people. Nobody remembers the days before the AI revolution, nor could they fathom it.
In 2018, the AI revolution is quickly replacing the need for human labor — and, thereby, for human life. As human desires increase, and the amount of available resources decline, it becomes ever more in the interest of the international community to
A) to reduce the global birthrate
and
B) outsource labour to intelligent agents.
AI bots do not require food, rest, civil protections, or pricey formal education. Although it (as of yet) requires an abundance of data, computing power, and skilled labor to produce a high-functioning AI application, with time, we can expect AI models to become more accessible and more rapidly deployable.
AI bots offer developing nations a unique opportunity to uplift themselves, in ways that were previously unfathomable.
I content that the first two fronts that AI will begin to predominate are marketing and healthcare.
Marketing is an involved and expensive process. Creating adds, and exposing them to the public, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars (depending on the reach of the campaign). Human marketing agents research their target demographic, and the best ones are able to covert exposure into sales at profitable rates. However. it is far more advantageous for industries to use machine learning models to predict which audiences and conduct marketing campaigns.
Social media platforms charge businesses to run targeted adds, however, as a small business owner, it is more to my interest to pay $30 for a 7 day Instagram marketing campaign than to pay a social media marketing team to run a campaign 24/7. With social media machine learning models I can choose to limit my adds to customers predicted to
A) visit my website
B) buy my product
C) share my add.
Health care in America is prohibitively expensive, making it inaccessible for the majority of citizens. Doctors cannot be entirely faulted for the exuberant prices they charge: they are saddled with prohibitive college debt, and have spent half of their lives out of the workforce pursing their profession. However, this does not change the fact of the matter that many members of the American middle class avoid the doctor to unhealthy extremes.
IBM Health, and other Biotech research agencies, are in the process of developing AI applications that review patient records, and identify patient conditions on par with primary care physicians. AI models are already able to detect cancer better than human doctors. I foresee AI being used to provide healthcare where it is otherwise inaccessible, and to supplement human doctors in privileged regions.
Of course, it is impossible to truly predict what the world will be like in 100 years. How could someone in 1918 have predicted our world today? As the imaginative and the innovative push the boundaries of reality, only time will tell what the future holds.

