'Smart Machines' Top the Hype Cycle, Gartner Says

Every summer, technologists turn to Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which has become a barometer of sorts for gauging the state of various hardware and software innovations that are expected to impact business and society over the next decade. This year, Gartner analysts have their eye on all manner of artificial intelligence technologies, including "smart machines" that can learn by themselves. After relieving "big data" from its hype-cycle duties last year–ostensibly due to the all-encompassing pervasiveness of data in this pervasively digital age–Gartner analysts this year are talking up a swath of related "smart machine" technologies. Together, Gartner refers to these technologies as key enablers of "the perceptual smart machine age" that is currently unfolding. "Smart machine technologies," the analyst group says in a press release, "will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years due to radical computational power, near-endless amounts of data, and unprecedented advances in deep neural networks that will allow organizations with smart machine technologies to harness data in order to adapt to new situations and solve problems that no one has encountered previously."