The Real Potential of AI (hint: it's not robots)

This week Stanford was the center of attention in the artificial intelligence community after it published news that it trained a deep learning model that diagnoses skin cancer as accurately as a dermatologist. The algorithm apparently can identify a cancerous mole with nothing more than a picture, meaning it could be put into the hands of anyone with a simple smartphone -- otherwise known as a pocket supercomputer. Deep learning is revolutionizing the way innovators can apply AI and data science to solve real-world problems. Image classification, facial recognition, computational linguistics, translation, augmented reality, self-driving cars -- all of these fields have made huge leaps in the last several years as computer scientists apply the rapidly-developing machine learning models that empower them. With all the excitement around these developments, one starts to wonder…what does a future with advanced AI look like?