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Where Artificial Intelligence Will Disrupt Next

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If you want to know where a technology is going, follow the patents. That’s what researchers from Stanford University and Brookings Institution recently did with artificial intelligence-related patents submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office, and they have come up with an interesting read on the types of disruptions the technology will be having on jobs and companies.

By analyzing keywords in AI patents, the researchers identified where AI will be having its greatest impact in the years ahead, above and beyond the “big—and often vague—claims” made about AI. “The technology remains a fluid and emergent topic, with no single definition and relatively little real-world examples of adoption to learn from,” state Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton, and Robert Maxim, all with Brookings institution, who provide analysis on Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Michael Webb’s approach of “quantifying the overlap between the text of AI patents and the text of job descriptions” that provides a unique way “to identify the kinds of tasks and occupations likely to be affected by particular AI capabilities.”

Such analysis, Muro and his team write, provides hard evidence on the direction AI will be taking in business settings. Common verbs appearing across patents include “recognize,” “predict,” and “detect,” while common nouns include “image,” “speech,” “face,” “voice,” “automobile,” “emotion,” “gesture,” “disease,” “quality,” “time,” and “performance.”

From these key words, Muro and his co-authors see the following emerging areas for AI solutions:

Augmenting human perception: “The verbs ‘recognize,’ ‘detect,’ and ‘determine; suggest a wide variety of AI capabilities focused on augmenting human perception,” they observe. “On this front, AI now often exceeds human accuracy, whether it be for voice- and facial-recognition or in transportation, medicine, or consumer protection.”

Automatically optimizing performance: A series of “control” references paired with select objects —- “control, process,” “control, emission,” “control, traffic,” — “point to an array of capabilities in which AI will link enhanced perception to automated command-control activities in order to automatically optimize performance, say of energy efficiency at a power plant.”

Predictions: The researchers also observe that widespread use of verbs such as “determine,” “classify,” and “predict” point to higher-order, human-centric capabilities, and “signal that patented AI applications have already begun to mimic high-level human mental processes.”

This content analysis of AI patents suggests that there may be disruption of many occupations, especially better-paid, white-collar occupations, Muro and his co-authors state in a related report. Industries that may be disrupted include finance and tech, as well as natural resource and production industries.

Industries that face the greatest exposure to AI include the following:

  1. Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting
  2. Utilities
  3. Manufacturing
  4. Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction
  5. Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
  6. Information
  7. Management of Companies and Enterprises
  8. Construction
  9. Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services
  10. Finance and Insurance

The following are occupations that have the greatest exposure to AI advances:

  1. Farming, fishing, and forestry
  2. Life, physical, and social sciences
  3. Computer and math
  4. Architecture and engineering
  5. Production
  6. Business and financial operations
  7. Installation, maintenance, and repair
  8. Construction and extraction
  9. Transportation and material moving
  10. Protective services


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