Q: Robots are the physical manifestation of AI – how will robots transform businesses/ our daily lives in the future?

A: When most people think of robots, what I’ve heard most often comes to mind is something vaguely humanoid or animal-shaped with mobility challenges and usually a sci-fi angle.

When I think of robots, I think of asking my phone “How do I get home?”

If we use this framework with robots as a physical manifestation of AI, it includes the phone you give your grandmother for Christmas. This is what we see now, her using her phone to interact with her bank, ask for directions to the doctor, trading travel pictures with her friends. We are building highly sophisticated technology enabling people to be part of automated decision processes into people’s lives every day.

In the future, and the future is now, we have to continue to make decisions about how and where to integrate technology into our lives.
These algorithms are data-intensive and we have to consider what that means in the applications we build for people. Most promising is the work that I see emphasizing pushing model training and data collection out to devices, to give users the same features they want from advanced products without having to give up your personal local data. There is an area of research known as federated learning which allows developers to give people the benefits that they want from this technology without having to give up their personal patterns. As data protection becomes increasingly important, the architectures for building the applications they want to use will change and platforms will have to adjust to support that.