Artificial intelligence is omnipresent: what we once considered a futuristic technology will soon permeate every sphere of life. So how will this impact businesses and the world at large? In his book AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent Chinese IT investor with executive experience at Google, Apple and Microsoft, dwells on four waves of AI, their present and future use cases. The Four Waves of AI According to Lee, the four waves are Internet AI, Business AI, Perceptual AI, and Autonomous AI. Internet AI is already familiar to most of us: there are recommendation engines that collect data from your browser and offer you exactly the information you are interested in based on your browsing behavior. Facebook seems to know exactly what you're thinking, as do YouTube and Amazon. This is Internet AI at work. On the Internet, AI is powered by user-submitted data: our clicks or non-clicks, our likes, our comments, our shares, and the time spent on a web page. But the future will take AI on the Internet even further. What started now as complex data analysis, building a detailed portrait of your personality based on your web browsing behavior, will soon bring us to a fully personalized web, tailored to your wants and needs, with even titles rewritten to appeal to your individual tastes. Say no. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay Chinese content aggregator Toutiao already uses natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and content management tools. data analysis to offer users fully personalized news feeds, based on detailed analysis of preferences and behaviors. The platform now has 120 million daily users and appears to be setting the standard for Web 3.0. Business AI, on the other hand, will work with data previously recorded and submitted during our interactions with financial, healthcare, legal and business institutions. . Through complex data analytics that, unlike the human brain, is trained to detect and process weakly correlated data, business AI can predict your future health and well-being, financial situation, and social behavior. For example, it can predict your likelihood of becoming a regular offender, whether you already have a criminal record, and even the likelihood of being involved in a car accident. Currently, China's SmartFinance mobile app, aimed at mobile payments and microcredit, can determine your ability to repay loans based on seemingly unrelated data stored in your phone. In the future, the same approach applied by insurance, health, travel and legal institutions will forever change our habits and lifestyles. Perceptual AI may seem like we're entering the realm of science fiction, but it's actually our nearest future. Smart homes and IoT, AR and VR devices combined with artificial eyes, ears and other sensors will erase the boundary between digital and physical environments, and the online-merged-offline (OMO) world will enrich reality physical with the variety and endless opportunities of the Internet. Imagine what it would be like to walk into a grocery store and be reminded by a personalized virtual assistant (aware of your nutritional needs and family situation) to pick up vegetables and milk - and pay with your faceinstead of a credit card since there is facial recognition. systems everywhere. But the final frontier of artificial intelligence, according to Kai-Fu Lee, will be autonomous AI. Equipped with full sensory and intellectual capabilities, machines will finally be able to function autonomously as distinct entities. This is actually what is happening now, as Elon Musk promises to take a first road trip in an autonomous car. by the end of 2018. According to Musk, autonomous vehicles will become common in the next decade. Driving your own car may soon become a recreational pastime, just like horseback riding. This will of course involve building smart roads equipped with sensors and allowing cars, roads and vehicles to interact with each other. Additionally, all manual labor in production and agriculture will be done by machines. AI technology and the future of work This brings us to an important question: how will AI transform the way we work, if so many human jobs become obsolete? McKinsey & Company predicts that nearly 800 million workers worldwide could be replaced by machines by 2030. What will happen to the human workforce? What professions or human roles will make sense in a world transformed by digital technology? In his Forbes article “7 Job Skills Of The Future”, big data expert Bernard Marr answers this question: jobs that require compassion and empathy, critical and strategic thinking, imagination and creativity will have the upper hand. Support and maintenance of computer systems will always require a human approach, at least until their deep learning skills teach machines to take care of themselves. It is certain that with the rise of IoT and the significant increase in the number of devices connected to the Internet, cybersecurity experts will be in high demand. AI and cybersecurity technologies are ambiguous from a security perspective. Machine learning and data analysis used for malicious purposes could lead to drastic effects and cybercrimes on previously unimaginable scales. They can also be used to detect cybercriminals and develop strong defense mechanisms. It's no wonder that IT companies, from tech giants to startups, are working to harness the power of AI to boost cybersecurity. Fortunately, some experts say most cybercriminals will lack the skills required to use AI for malicious attacks. But this could just mean that cybercrime will become more organized. Today, cybersecurity is a rapidly developing branch of AI and the market for security solutions is booming, with the arrival of players like the telecommunications company AT&T or the defense company Raytheon. But cybersecurity is not the only sector affected by artificial intelligence: IT outsourcing is now being disrupted by AI. AI Outsourcing RevolutionArtificial intelligence and robotic process automation are capable of speeding up production, ensuring better quality control and ultimately increasing company revenue by several hundred percent. Chinese companies are already replacing their human employees with robots and managing to significantly increase their production rates. So why haven't all companies jumped on the AI ​​bandwagon yet? Can we attribute China's success in adopting AI to the simple fact that the country's companies are not using existing infrastructure extensively?. .