The possibilities seem endless.

An 18 wheeler that can drive across the country at night with less traffic and no human to interfere!

No parking lots, as all needed cars could be used as needed and no unnecessary excess – land savings, energy saving and environmental savings!

A robot does the job, endlessly with no rest.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Jets cooled

In this recent neat Wharton School Panel Review Report  a lot of cold water is tossed on some of the possibilities …. (Wharton is our friend as occasional co-host of live Sirius Radio Your Money, with Kent Smetters)

But First a few recent headlines!

CNBC 7-19-17 “Half of American Jobs are at risk from automation, new study suggests”

The Guardian 9-13-15 “Self driving cars: From 2020 you will be permanent back seat driver”

Not so Fast on AI – Artificial Intelligence Taking Over the World!

On Self Driving Cars

From the Wharton Panel Review.

Vijay Kumar, dean of engineering at University of Pennsylvania (very credible position for opinion)

“It turns out that so much of what appears in mainstream media about self-driving cars being just around the corner is very much overstated …”

“In other words, many optimistic articles about autonomous vehicles overlook the fact that it will take many years to get enough data to make fully self-driving cars work at a large scale — not just a couple of years.”

“A fundamental problem is that most observers do not realize just how vast an amount of data is needed to operate in the physical world — ever-increasing amounts, or, as Kumar calls it — “exponential” amounts”

So this makes sense to us … the last few incremental steps for this to actually occur may be MUCH greater than many think, it’s just harder to get the last 100% completely automated vehicle.

Calling Elon Musk Out

Again from Professor Kumar …

“Elon Musk will also tell you that batteries are improving and getting better and better. Actually, it’s the same battery that existed five or 10 years ago.” What is different is that batteries have become smaller and less expensive, “because more of us are buying batteries. But fundamentally it’s the same thing.”

There sure seems to be a lot of confusion on this subject… some say the batteries are getting better, but few can prove it at this point…

Machines still have a long way to go

“In the near future, no one needs to worry because machines are pretty dumb….” Kumar said. As an example, Fung (Pascale Fung, a professor of electronic and computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) explained that she could make a robot today capable of doing some simple household chores, but, “it’s still cheaper for me to do it, or to teach my kids or my husband to do it. So, for the near future there are tons of jobs where it would be too expensive to replace them with machines. Fifty to 100 years from now, that’s likely to change, just as today’s world is different from 50 years ago.”

We find this extremely interesting, greatly enjoy the views and encourage you to read the article….

The Total Opposite View

In February of 2015 we had the opportunity to listen to Peter Diamandis and wrote a report on his findings here …

He said two years ago, that computers would be faster/smarter than humans in eight years .. here is the chart from the report we wrote…

Someone is wrong!

Differing opinions are great!

Likely somewhere between 6 years and 100 … Ok , know its wide, but that’s the extreme from both views !

Careful what you believe!!!

Hope you enjoyed!

John A. Kvale CFA, CFP

Founder of J.K. Financial, Inc.

A Dallas Texas based fee only

Financial Planning Total Wealth

Management firm.

www.jkfinancialinc.com

www.street-cents.com