Beyond the Hype: An AI-Driven World Is Still a Long Way Off

Robots that serve dinner, self-driving cars and drone-taxis could be fun and hugely profitable. They are likely much further off than the hype suggests. A panel of experts at the recent 2017 Wharton Global Forum in Hong Kong outlined their views on the future for artificial intelligence (AI), robots, drones, other tech advances and how it all might affect employment in the future. The upshot was to deflate some of the hype, while noting the threats ahead posed to certain jobs. Their comments came in a panel session titled, "Engineering the Future of Business," with Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett moderating and speakers Pascale Fung, a professor of electronic and computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Vijay Kumar, dean of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nicolas Aguzin, Asian-Pacific chairman and CEO for J.P.Morgan. Kicking things off, Garrett asked: How big and disruptive is the self-driving car movement? It turns out that so much of what appears in mainstream media about self-driving cars being just around the corner is very much overstated, said Kumar.