Google's vision for AI is the right one

Artificial Intelligence can help us, dammit. The notion of a coming AI apocalypse has grown tiresome, especially because it invariably makes the leap from the nascent forms of AI we experience now to a terrifying future were every robot can out-think and, eventually, annihilate us. I'm not saying it's not an eventuality, but it is also decades or more away. It's time to focus on the now, which is why I was so pleased with Google's I/O 2017 developer's keynote on Wednesday. In it, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described the fundamental shift from a mobile-first landscape to an AI-first one. In fact, mobile hardware and software remain a crucial part of Google's strategy, but now all of it is infused, at some level, with artificial intelligence and, especially, machine learning.