An AI system devised by DeepMind will beat the best human at Go. (Rather splendidly, he is called Yoda.)- SwiftKey’s Neural Alpha – a keyboard for phones which uses Deep Learning to dramatically improve predictive typing – will be launched to the general public and will be big news.
- Virtual reality will become really quite a big thing.
- The existential risk organisations (FLI in Boston, FHI at Oxford, CSER at Cambridge, MIRI in California) will continue to grow resources and awareness despite a media backlash against 2015’s excitement about all things AI.
- My book The Economic Singularity, about technological unemployment, will be published.
- The debate about Universal Basic Income (UBI) will go mainstream, and become politicised. The left will demand it immediately, but no country will introduce it nationwide.
- Siri, Cortana etc will get much better. But we won’t settle on a generic name for them yet.
- Google Glass will make a comeback, ducking the “glasshole” cynicism by targeting B2B applications.
- Google will announce a significant development with their collection of robot companies.
- Intel will decide whether or not it is able to keep Moore‘s Law going in the next decade. If it can’t, IBM, Samsung and others will claim that they can.
- The number of items considered part of the burgeoning Internet of Things will reach seventy bazillion.
- California will reverse its decision to impose bureaucratic roadblocks to self-driving cars. Buses and trains without human drivers or chaperones will appear in a few more towns and cities around the world, and more new passenger cars will contain self-driving elements.
Happy New Year!
