Jon Walker

In the past decade the number of people killed by natural disasters each year has ranged from as low as 14,389 in 2015 to as high as 314,503 in 2010, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Every year over 100,000,000 people are also affected by natural disasters. Government, companies, and aid organizations are all working to keep these tragic deaths as low as possible. One tool they have turned to for help in recent years is search and rescue robots.

The amount of data companies have on customers and the number of channels customers are using to interact with businesses have grown significantly in the past decade. Artificial intelligence may hold great promise in optimizing customer and client interactions.

Mining is a major worldwide industry producing everything from coal to gold. According to a PWC annual report, the top 40 mining companies have a market capitalization of $748 billion as of April 2017. The industry as a whole saw a slump in 2015 but since then the sector has recovered due to rising commodity prices.

Food processing is one of the major manufacturing sectors in the United States. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 16 percent of the value of shipments from all U.S. manufacturing plants comes from food processing plants. These plants employ around 1.5 million workers in this country.

Both artificial intelligence and robotics have been improving over the past few years. Large companies are betting billions that in the near future we will have cars that can drive themselves, drones that can fly themselves to deliver packages, automatic fast food chefs, AI personal assistants, manufacturing robots that can train themselves and other robots, etc.

For most people, the direct impact of improvements in weather forecasting may seem to be that it simply makes vacation planning easier, but even smallest advancement in predicting the weather can produce massive improvements for businesses and governments.

Our cities, streets, homes, and businesses are built for beings that walk on two legs (biped). From stairs to the shape of hallways to the placement of kitchen cabinets, all have been designed for bipeds. The fact that a society of two-legged creatures designed everything around them for bipeds is so obvious most people don’t even think about it, but it becomes a serious issue when talking about the future of robotics.

Several car makers predict they will able to make true self-driving cars in the next few years - as we've covered in our recent self-driving car timeline article. This technology, though, is only valuable if there are plenty of roads these self-driving cars are legally allowed to travel on. Even if the technologies allow for true autonomy, without legal permission the self-driving cars are mostly worthless to individuals and companies.

While in previous decades military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) were very simple pieces of equipment, the technology has advanced rapidly. They are now used all over the world and are a multi-billion dollar industry. According to the Teal Group, current worldwide military UAV production stands at around $2.8 billion, and they project it will grow to $9.4 billion in 2025.

Major companies including GE, Siemens, Intel, Funac, Kuka, Bosch, NVIDIA and Microsoft are all making significant investments in machine learning-powered approaches to improve all aspects of manufacturing. The technology is being used to bring down labor costs, reduce product defects, shorten unplanned downtimes, improve transition times, and increase production speed.