According to Wikipedia, "Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by non-human animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs."
Why AI could be powerful?
Firstly, it's backed up by expert knowledge and huge amount of data.
Secondly, it has high speed of processing and reaction.
Thirdly, it can keep evolving and can only grow stronger.
Lastly, it can live forever.
So what's the future and the best value of AI?
It's very simple. AI should provide the best support to human, help people solve problems in life, and help us build a better world.
Blue Eden Project outlines the most important and value-added activities for better life and better world, which could also serve as a blueprint for the future direction of AI technologies.
The best value of AI is to help people achieve a healthy, financial worry-free, wise and happy life in a simplest way, which could include but not limited to the following areas:
AI food management: Healthy recipes based on needs -> Obtain food ingredients -> Cooking. This value chain can help people save lots of time and money, enjoy more healthy lifestyle, and best prevent chronic diseases.
AI Exercise playmate: exercise should be fun. The playmate can serve as a personal trainer, design joyful exercise games, can join the play, and can measure the outcomes.
AI Yoga and meditation trainer: teach and assist people to do Yoga and meditation each day, can also help people to relax.
AI Coaching: including life coach, career coach, mental health coach, relationship coach and parenting coach, etc.
AI health assistant: Measure and evaluate health status each week, provide recommendations and health reminders, deal with easier cases, and can do some emergency cares.
AI medical assistant: help to identify health risks (like cancer), develop medicines, and do surgeries, etc.
AI learning: help people learn any topics in a best way.
AI personal financial planning: help people to best deal with financial planning topics, such as budgeting and saving, investment portfolio, insurance, tax and estate planning, etc.
AI home management: home interior design, home safety, fixing small home issues, home cleaning, snow shoveling, etc.
AI travel planning: help people to best plan for travel.
AI recommendations: help people to find and recommend the best music, movies, books based on specific needs.
AI technologies still have a long way to go to satisfy all the important requirements for people. But most of the topics in here are not difficult to develop, and could become reality within the next 5 years.