From Siri to support chats, Artificial Intelligence is already part of our lives and, according to the Harvard Business Review, it has already begun to revolutionize industries such as web search, advertising, e-commerce, finance, and more.
According to Computer World, AI comes in many different flavors such as strong, weak, narrow, general, and everywhere in between. Programmers task AI with doing everything from making purchase recommendations with Amazon's Echo to beating world-class chess masters with IBM's Watson.
Custom solutions
Young AI enthusiasts are starting to adapt AI programs to new and different problems every day to help people and discover new methods of machine learning. Fortune magazine focused on one such individual, Joshua Browder, who created a chat interface to help people appeal their parking tickets.
Dubbed DoNotPay, the program learns details about the user's situation to help write and file an appeal. The lawyer robot is great news for many citizens that find themselves on the wrong side of the parking meter as it provides its services for free to anyone that needs them. In one of the two cities that DoNotPay is available, New York City, it is prohibitively expensive to hire a lawyer to handle the appeal. This expense helps to explain why New Yorkers pay more than $600 million a year in parking tickets alone.
Observers expect AI to extend the reach of the ordinary person, perhaps subverting the power of government to regulate people — or maybe the opposite. Maybe AI will enhance the control. Time will tell.
