Democratic artificial intelligence will shape future technologies: Gartner

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key area of research and development, and while AI and machine learning algorithms begin to influence everything from our cars to our social media news feeds, the technology will soon be available to everyone.

That is if Gartner's predictions on emerging technology trends prove to be true.

On Monday, the research agency said that democratized AI will be one of the major trends which will shape our future technologies.

The research is based on the so-called "Hype Cycle," which comprises of insights from over 2,000 technologies into 35 main areas of interest and trends, with a particular focus on innovations which could give businesses a future competitive advantage.

Gartner

Gartner says that AI technologies will be "virtually everywhere" over the next 10 years, but it will be open to the masses rather than being purely commercial.

Cloud computing, open-source projects, and the "maker" community will mold this trend, eventually "propelling AI into everyone's hands."

AI-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, autonomous driving, mobile robots, conversational AI platforms & assistants, and deep neural nets are expected to become major enterprise technologies in the future.

"Technologies representing democratized AI populate three out of five sections on the Hype Cycle, and some of them, such as deep neural nets and virtual assistants, will reach mainstream adoption in the next two to five years," said Mike Walker, research vice president at Gartner. "Other emerging technologies of that category, such as smart robots or AI PaaS, are also moving rapidly through the Hype Cycle approaching the peak and will soon have crossed it."

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In addition to democratized AI, Gartner has selected four other technology trends of note.

Compartmentalized PC systems are phasing out, only to be replaced with ecosystem-supporting alternatives, which, in turn, is expected to prompt new business models based on the blockchain, digital twin technologies, IoT platforms, and knowledge graphs.

Alongside new business models, Gartner predicts an uptick in "human-centric" technologies including 4D-printing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected home, edge computing AI, and self-healing systems.

It is also expected that we will begin to explore the concept of biohacking with more fervor. RFID chips are already implantable, but the research agency believes that augmentation, nutrigenomics, and experimental biological experiments will also appear during the next decade.

See also: How the GPU became the heart of AI and machine learning

The final trend of note is the use of ubiquitous infrastructure.

Cloud computing, a vast ecosystem of operating systems and IoT devices, data centers, and more have changed the fabric of enterprise infrastructures -- and this has paved the way for increased adoption of new technologies including 5G, carbon nanotubes, deep neural network ASICs, neuromorphic hardware and quantum computing.

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"Business and technology leaders will continue to face rapidly accelerating technology innovation that will profoundly impact the way they engage with their workforce, collaborate with their partners, and create products and services for their customers," said Walker. "CIOs and technology leaders should always be scanning the market along with assessing and piloting emerging technologies to identify new business opportunities with high impact potential and strategic relevance for their business."