Hardly a day goes by where a robot doesn't beat a human at things originally thought to be impossible to automate.

This year especially, artificial intelligence (AI) has had a renaissance — Tesla pushed their self-driving autopilot out to all eligible cars, and Googleand Facebookhave both announced large investments in AI research.

The latest human jobs to be taken by robots include video game playingand trading stocks. In the near future, robots might even become your best friend.

Where will these technologies take us next? Well to know that we should determine what's the best of the best now. Tech Insider talked to 18 AI researchers, roboticists, and computer scientists to see what real-life AI impresses them the most.

Scroll down to see their lightly edited responses.

Subbarao Kambhapati is impressed by how quickly we've developed self-driving cars.


"I think autonomous driving is most impressive to me.

Autonomous driving first started in the Nevada deserts. It's harder to drive in the urban streets than in rough, almost nonexistent roads in the Nevada desert. Again, because the hardest thing is reasoning the intentions, to some extent, of other drivers on the road.

"That has been quite impressive, that we went that far that quickly. I'm pretty much sure that some years down the line, none of us actually have to drive."

Commentary from Subbarao Kambhapati, a computer scientist at Arizona State University.

At this rate, cars will be driving themselves in no time, and Carlos Guestrin can't wait.



"It took me a long time to really understand what the implications or impact of the self driving cars would be on our society. I don't like to drive now, so this is kind of a commodity for me.

"The recent results that we're seeing with things such as self-driving cars, like an ability to significantly decrease traffic accidents— I think that's really exciting to think about.

"I think about a world with no cars would be exciting to me but think about a world with automation of vehicles and the impact it will have on society. That's really exciting."

Commentary from Carlos Guestrin, the CEO and cofounder of Dato, a company that builds artificially intelligent systems to analyze data.

A program that learned to fly a model helicopter like a world-champion blew Peter Norvig away.



Reuters
"One of my favorite systems is Andrew Ng's system that learned to pilot a model helicopter from a few hours of observation, and was able to perform tricks at the level of world-champion pilots.

"This was before the introduction of super-stable quadcopters — the copter used in this experiment was extremely challenging to control."

Commentary from Peter Norvig, director of research at Google.

Source:Business Insider