• While artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, there are many thrilling changes coming for businesses.
• Better algorithms will give you better information, decisions and advertisements.
• The tech industry will boom, personal privacy will be debatable, and AI will help make your job more interesting.

Like it or not, machine learning is here to stay. Data-intensive recursive algorithms are taking artificial intelligence to the next level, allowing the machines to produce more sophisticated statistical models of anything they have enough information about to analyse. There are a litany of changes coming over the next decade thanks to these strides in development, but it may still be too early to tell which will be the most impactful.

Change #1: Better and fairer algorithms

If you believe that humans have bias, you should not be overly surprised to learn that machines, learning to make predictions about the world based on data sets, can also develop similar biases. Trying to wean the machines off these biases and produce fairer predictions and assessments is not only one of the big challenges facing machine learning scientists today, but also one of the most exciting possibilities for the future.

When a Harvard professor put her name into Google’s search engine, the results were skewed because of her ethnic-sounding name. Had she not been an accomplished academic, that could give a disastrous impression to potential employers looking to find out more about her. Ideally, machine learning can overcome that hurdle.

Change #2: More data collection

For better or for worse, more and better machine learning means a lot more data collection about basically anything and everything that the algorithms want to assess. If you don’t mind the occasional data harvest, it means more relevant advertisements, more accurate statistical predictions, and more everything. If you’re more precious about your privacy or averse to having information collected about you, now is the time to start coping. The silver lining, however, is that there’s an awful lot of useful data out there that’s not related to your browser history.

Change #3: More interesting jobs

The most common refrain when it comes to advanced machine learning and sophisticated artificial intelligence is that they will take our jobs away. That is at least partially true; low-skilled work, mostly of the clerical variety, is most ripe for replacement by machines, but there’s still enough time for workers to build their skill sets and prepare for more complex work. On the flipside, if your job involves a mix of the two, artifical intelligence means you’ll get to devote more focus on the more interesting or creative aspects of your job. If you work in social media advertising, for instance, it means fewer metrics and more writing and brainstorming.

Change #4: Explosive tech sector growth

The tech sector certainly isn’t high on the list of markets that need any kind of stimulus boost, but it’s likely coming anyway. Artificial intelligence won’t take care of itself; adaptive algorithms need a team of skilled and experienced workers behind the wheels in order to ensure that starts, and continues, moving in the right direction. You will see a big growth in both AI education and industry, when students and workers start coming in to fill the demand for data scientists and other roles needed to improve and maintain machine learning infrastructures.