There is one thing in life that you can count on: AI is going to be bigger and happen sooner than almost any of us expect.

Autonomous cars are perhaps the most visible implementations of AI, but it’s creeping in everywhere.  From personal assistants (Sirri, Cortana, Alexa etc), to administration jobs (IBM’s Watson), and now – design and engineering.  Have a look at this article about a team who have applied machine learning to automotive design:

http://www.drive.com.au/motor-news/how-artificial-intelligence-could-design-your-next-car-20170228-gumxy6.html

From the article:

The first Hack Rod prototype created using generative design resulted in a chassis that is 35 per cent lighter than the team’s engineers first managed.

Just let that sink in: on its first try the AI software managed to reduce the weight of a human designed chassis by 35%.

That is unbelievable.  Gains of a few percentage points are what you expect in professional design and manufacturing.  Not 35%.  And this isn’t a design that you can look at and say “Well, ok, now that I have seen it, I could do it too”.  No, this is design that is entirely beyond human ability to ever conceive.

As a deisgner that’s scary – and amazing.

For now we are still in charge of this process.  Controlling and guiding every aspect of it.  However, I can easily imagine a time in the future when an entirely automated, AI guided system can design, build, and operate a fleet of autonomous vehicles, continually monitoring the performance data of the fleet to optimise the physical performance, the satisfaction level of customers to optimise the aesthetics and comfort, and tweaking each new batch of 3D printed cars to improve over the last batch.  No human guidance necessary.

And this isn’t some nebulous, far future, pie-in-the-sky idea.  The pieces are coming together to make this possible very, very quickly.  The McLaren Technology Group already know how to monitor and analyse vehicle performance to the Nth degree.  Market research and analysis of consumer behaviour is what every single company on earth does to some degree or other.  The only missing bit is for AI to tie all of these function together.

The consequences of such a system – economic, social, and political are literally unimaginable at this time.

But the writing is on the wall.  It’s coming.  It’s not going to be stopped.