Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI highlighted the rapidly increasing expectations regarding the business benefits of AI and the low incidence of business gains so far; the increasing adoption of AI by businesses worldwide and the challenges in its implementation and integration with exiting processes; and how companies respond to AI by both reducing and training their workforce.
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A report by CB Insights shows that, as of August, 2019 was on track to surpass last year’s record number of AI startup acquisitions. The annual tally has grown an average of 38 percent every year since 2010.
Bloomberg: Automation has “contributed substantially” to reducing the portion of national income that goes to U.S. workers over the past two decades, according to a new study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Despite the lowest unemployment rate in around 50 years, the so-called labor share has fallen to about 56% from 63% in 2000 and the increased use of robots and other technology has been an important driving factor.
Source: Decoding AI in the US
Asked what is the biggest misconception about AI, Yoshua Bengio answered without hesitation “AI is not magic.” Winner of the 2018 Turing Award (with the other “fathers of the deep learning revolution,” Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun), Bengio spoke at the EmTech MIT event about the “amazing progress in AI” while stressing the importance of understanding its current limitations and recognizing that “we are still very far from human-level AI in many ways.”
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Chinese AI startups received $6.1 billion in VC funding over the past four years – almost 70% more than their U.S. counterparts, which raised $3.6 billion during the same period.
The price of computation today is roughly one hundred-millionth what it was in the 1970s, when the first microprocessors became commercially available (see chart). According to figures collected by John McCallum, a computer scientist, a megabyte of data storage in 1956 would have cost around $9,200 ($85,000 in today’s prices). It now costs just $0.00002.
59% of US adults say it is acceptable for law enforcement to use facial recognition to assess security threats in public spaces; only 15% say it is acceptable for advertisers to use facial recognition to see how people respond to public ad displays; 13% of US adults have not heard about facial recognition and 25% say they heard a lot.
In 2002, 56 percent of the jobs studied required low amounts of digital skills. Nearly 40 percent of jobs required medium digital skills and just 5 percent required high digital skills.
A lot has changed. By 2016, the share of jobs requiring high digital skills had jumped to 23 percent. The share requiring medium digital skills rose to 48 percent. And in a huge shift, the share of jobs requiring low digital skills fell from 56 to 30 percent.
