GUV magazine October 2019 issue editorial
It is easy enough to think of artificial intelligence and quantum technologies as modern-day concepts, as futuristic as they sound and as far-reaching their impact has the potential to be. With AI already capable of everything from identifying patients at risk of a stroke to pricing loans issued by financial institutions, it certainly feels as though its potential is being realised in front of our eyes – but its futuristic aspect of self-aware machines remains out of reach.
Quantum computing may seem more elusive, but it is much closer than one might think. Google last week published a paper in scientific journal Nature that illustrated how its quantum processor, Sycamore, achieved quantum supremacy, that is to say it was able to perform a task in 200 seconds that purportedly would have taken a supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.
That kind of timespan is long enough to consider the task impossible and that impossibility was the reality just a few months ago. It should be noted that IBM researchers have disputed Google’s claim it would have taken that long, arguing it would have been just two and a half days using a supercomputer. Despite these radically different time frames, reducing a calculation even from 60 hours to just over three minutes still represents a significant shift in capabilities and brings home the idea of just how fundamental a shift we are looking at here.
Just how quantum technologies are inching closer and closer to the present day is the topic of this month’s feature article, Cracking the quantum puzzle, talking to academic and industry leaders in the sector.
But what about that self-aware machine? Having robot butlers is an idea dating back decades, and one that inspired countless children through the television show The Jetsons.
But the concept is much older even than the term artificial intelligence itself. Alan Turing is typically credited as the father of AI, yet notably Turing died two years before John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1956. That’s six years before the US had set itself the challenge of going to the moon – talk about a modern-day technology!
Although the US and China are the world leaders when it comes to securing AI investment today, Turing’s legacy lives on as the UK is in third place with a total of $1bn secured by companies during the first six months of 2019, according to Tech Nation. A report by the OECD even estimated that the total invested in AI startups between 2011 and mid-2018 was an astounding $50bn.
Cheque sizes have been increasing in the area. A look at figures from our sister site Global Corporate Venturing shows that, while AI companies raised $4.9bn from corporate venture capital funds between 2011 and 2018, the total for this year through to October 21 was already $3.6bn.
It is no coincidence that University of Oxford’s inaugural AI@Oxford conference last month – see our coverage in this month’s magazine – was a sell-out success. Interest in machine and deep learning has been increasing dramatically as computers finally reach the processing power to make the technology viable and enough data exists to feed the algorithms.
We are now only two months away from the 2020s – this time the decade might just be roaring thanks to AI and quantum technologies.
