Time Is Right To Capitalise On Artificial Intelligence

Just weeks after the publication of the UK government's review of the country's capabilities in artificial intelligence, Southampton Professor Dame Wendy Hall, co-chair of the review, says the time is right to capitalise while the time is right. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time as a concept but in reality, we're now seeing a major surge in the technological development of AI which is likely to see automation continue to escalate and accelerate. The machines we're building today are so much more powerful than ever before in terms of their processing power and storage ability, and because of the huge amounts of data available, we've vastly improved our capacity to build intelligent systems that can learn and begin to'think' for themselves, although it's still an open question as to whether they will ever really be able to outperform the human brain. But we now need to act in order to realise the full potential of AI and achieve the positive benefits it can deliver. Through our review, we made 18 specific recommendations including a number that focus on ways in which universities, research institutes, industry and government can come together to better prepare us for the AI landscape of the future.