Ask the Thought Leaders: What Impact Will AI Have In The Next 20 Years?

The next 20 years will see a significant departure from what we currently call cognitive and deep AI technologies and progress toward what would arguably be called conscious machine intelligence. There will be a dichotomy in commercial efforts, the former concentrating on rivalling human intelligence, the biggest moneymakers being forms of AI broader than those currently used in cybersecurity, medicine, and financial modeling. The latter breakaway effort would concentrate on artificial neural architectures emulating all aspects of brain function, allowing researchers to better understand mind and consciousness, the most lucrative venture therein being the creation of the necessary download vessels for the preservation of human consciousness. On the military front, generals and admirals will abandon the concept of one-to-many control and embrace a zero-to-many tack that allows sufficiently'indoctrinated' AI to autonomously make and act upon its own ideologically-based battlefield decisions, with or without a declaration of war.