Machine Learning and AI

One of the most important areas that you need to gain a strong understanding in the next 5 years is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This is not about an Skynet kinda scenario where an super-intelligence singularity is going to take over the world and destroy humanity.

This is about the next major revolution in technology and whether you are going to be a player or a pawn in what is happening next.

I highly recommend that you read Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future book where he provides a really clean mapping of what (most likely) will happen next.

One area that Kevin talks in detail and you can already see it happening around us is the introduction of AI capabilities in all sort of devices and business activities.

This is where you need to take a proactive approach and start learning about how all this works and how to program it.

The great news is that in the last couple years the major cloud providers have been investing really hard on these technologies and are now providing environments where you can easily play around and learn how machine learning and AI works

See for example all the different tools and technologies that AWS is already offering in the machine learning space (Microsoft is also providing some really cool capabilities on Azure)

As a developer, you will be soon be asked to write code that integrates with Machine Learning technology to process large amounts of data or to integrate an app with AI services like voice, image recognition or domain-specific analysis (for example in medicine)

Where are we going

For a nice view of what could be happening next see:

• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
• What Technology Wants