The 10 Influential Business Leaders to Watch in 2019_compressed

advertisements to specific log ins on the basis of their
browsing history. Data pertaining to billions of searches on
Google is helping to provide the browsing history and
buying behaviour of people and helping the retails industry
to finetune its products and Advertisement spend.
AI is also finding major use in the field of medicine. IBMs
‘Watson’ is an early example of an online doctor capable of
diagnosing a given disease on the basis of the symptoms
and providing medication for the same. The field of surgery
is replete with many surgical instruments with AI and
robotics capability helping human surgeons undertake
complicated surgeries. Recently an operation done in
Indiana Police in USA, a surgeon using a Google Glass
was automatically supplied with imaging and diagnostic
data pertaining to the organ S/he was operating on
seamlessly. This meant that the surgeon did not need to
take his/her eyes off the organ to refer to the imaging or
diagnostic data while performing the surgery.
Driverless cars are fast becoming a reality. The driverless
car developed by Google has already clocked a million
mile. The city of Singapore has already launched the first
driverless Taxi service in the city. It is expected that in a
decade or so, driving as a profession shall vanish and most
of the cars on the streets will be driverless cars.
The speed at which Artificial Intelligence based
applications are proliferating across all domains of the
economy, it is very difficult to predict its complete impact
over the coming decade. Almost all sectors of the economy
shall be impacted by AI based applications and devices.
Driverless cars shall certainly become a reality. That shall
mean many less cars on the road and nearly zero accident
rates. (Since automated driverless cars shall always avoid
collision using AI and proximity devices.)
The communication as we know shall undergo a complete
change. Holograms (Virtual and Mixed reality devices)
shall change the communication experience across the
entire spectrum. Someone sitting in India shall be able to
deliver a lecture in the USA as if the person was present
there. Online real time translation shall also mean that the
lecture given in one language will be translated online and
delivered in any other language of choice using Natural
Language algorithms.
Enormous proliferation of IOT (Internet of Things) devices
across all sectors of an economy shall mean that these
devices shall generate voluminous data. Such data (in Tera
and Peta Bytes) will only be possible to be crunched and
made sense of using AI and machine learning techniques.
Thus, IoT controlled Devices driven by AI based
applications, continuously fine tuning their actions on the
basis of analysing big data produced by IOT devices shall
govern our life in the year 2030. We will not drive to office,
we will interact with virtual people using holograms rather
than real people, machines shall do most of the mundane
routine work, social media is likely to impact the way
people shall interact with each other and socializing as we
understand today may undergo a complete change.
Will such an influx of AI in our lives impact the jobs. Will it
mean that a number of jobs in the economy shall be lost to
smart Robots, who shall do the same job better, at a lesser
cost and more accurately? The verdict on job losses is
mixed. If we go by the history of automation, we find that
automation has always created more jobs rather than taken
away jobs. Advent of computers and automation has
always helped expand the economic activities faster and
has helped grow the economies across the globe. However,
there is a possibility that the types of jobs may undergo a
change. People may have to re-skill themselves in to using
newer technologies and some professions may be lost for
good. Blue collar jobs are likely to give way to white collar
jobs. People at the bottom of the pyramid may find it very
difficult to find jobs because of robots and IoTbased
devices undertaking all mundane repetitive jobs done by
humans. This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise and
the quality of human effort will undergo a change for the
better.
42 September 2019