Future of AI & 5G IV: Driving Cleaner Economic Growth & Employment
This is the penultimate part of the series relating to the future of AI. The final part after this will consider AGI, Super Intelligence and where we are today in terms of the cutting edge of AI. Definitions of AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning can be found on the following link “An Introduction to AI” and for the purpose of this article I will consider AI to cover Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
A key and consistent theme across the series is that Digital Transformation will occur across all sectors of the economy during the 2020s resulting from applications of Machine Learning and 5Genabling machine to machine communication, the proliferation of Edge Computing, and emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) taking off.
A key theme in this article will be about the potential for AI and the other emerging technologies that 5G will enable to deliver sustainable economic development and creation of new employment opportunities with exciting new business opportunities over the course of the next decade. It will also consider issues such as how AI can help in the fight against pollution resulting from plastics.
This article is posted against the backdrop of the Conference of the Parties (COP) 25 being held in Madrid with UN chief António Guterres stating the global response to date has been “utterly inadequate” and that the “point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us. As a speaker at the Business and Industry NGO (BINGO) events at previous COPs at the UNFCC I have long urged politicians and regulators to incentivise the deployment of more efficient and cleaner technology at scale to enable the fight against climate change. Furthermore, we need to also change the perspective of next generation technology as something that is going to wipe out employment and instead understand the opportunities to drive skilled employment opportunities alongside the efficiency gains that will deliver a cleaner environment that can also allow for economic growth.
New Markets, New Product Innovations with AI and 5G
The period of the next decade will be one about Digital Transformation into a data-driven world where AI, 5G and the vast growth in data that the IoT will bring will drive change at a faster rate than ever before in the history of humanity. We will transition to a world where devices are increasingly connected and communicate with each other (D2D) as well as increasing human computer interaction use cases. The project growth is illustrated in a forecast by Gartner that 5G IoT endpoints will triple between 2020 and 2021. This in turn will generate more data.
Nick Ismail in “The value of data: forecast to grow 10-fold by 2025” (from 2017 volumes) observed that the role of IoT and embedded systems in 2025 would result in an average connected person anywhere in the world interacting with “…connected devices nearly 4,800 times per day – basically one interaction every 18 seconds.”
The chart below with source data from Statista illustrates the scale of growth in connected devices in the period to 2025 and this in turn will result in vast amounts of data that will in turn require Machine Learning to make sense of the data.
Tom Coughlin observed that the forecast data will be 175 Zettabytes by 2025 and the chart below with source data from IDC and Seagate illustrates what the projected growth.
The chart above illustrates one reason for my opinion that is shared by the likes of Andrew Ng and Tiernan Ray that “No, there will not be an AI winter” anytime soon as the growth in data means that we will need Machine Learning and Deep Learning methods to make sense of the deluge of data across all areas of research and business.
There will be challenges for those who are not accustomed to rapid change.
