So you call up Nick Bostrom and he very reliably gives you a quote about the existential threat of a superintelligence, even though no one in the industry thinks we're anywhere close to that. (What's next for AI is not superintelligence...) And you force a great researcher like Andrew Ng to talk about job loss among truck drivers, because that's what will make it relevant to people outside AI.
We should be thinking about job loss and how the job market will change, but this type of article never gets past the "Oh No AI Will Destroy US" stage of thinking. But a lot of the questions raised by AI are actually relevant now, in an economy where AI hasn't even made a big impact. That is, they're not AI issues, but we're treating them as though they are. How should our societies treat and support the humans who have become unnecessary? They obviously will not all become data analysts and robot caretakers.
What's next for AI is better natural-language processing. Right now, chatbots are pretty dumb, but in the next few years, they'll get much better, and in more languages.
What's next for AI is the wider deployment of mature technology. Many problems such as image recognition have been solved, but developers and companies have not figured out how to deploy the solutions yet. We still have chokepoints in the number of data scientists who can tune and train models, and the number of engineers who can plug them into existing stacks. So AI will be felt directly, rather than just talked about.[0]
What's next for AI is an arms race. The major powers will be escalating the how they deploy AIs against AIs, embedded in drones or through the creation of adversarial data to slip through filters. Commercially, many smaller arms races will occur in different industries, as AI drives down the costs of interpreting data, and allows rival organizations to compete on price.
What's next for AI is the combination of the flavor of the month, deep learning, with other extremely powerful algorithms like reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search to create goal-oriented strategic decision-making agents.