Self Driving Phones

The iPhone X is here, representing the new level of innovation for hardware design — but it doesn’t drive.

From the most recent installment of Professor Mohanbir Sawhney at the Kellogg School:

“As we have seen, when the vector of differentiation shifts, market leaders tend to fall by the wayside. In the brave new world of AI, Google and Amazon have the clear edge over Apple. Consider Google’s Pixel 2 phone: Driven by AI-based technology, it offers unprecedented photo-enhancement features and deeper hardware-software integration, such as real-time language translation when used with Google’s special headphones…The shifting vector of differentiation to AI and agents does not bode well for Apple…

Sheets of glass are simply no longer the most fertile ground for innovation. That means Apple urgently needs to shift its focus and investment to AI-driven technologies, as part of a broader effort to create the kind of ecosystem Amazon and Google are building quickly. However, Apple is falling behind in the AI race, as it remains a hardware company at its core and it has not embraced the open-source and collaborative approach that Google and Amazon are pioneering in AI.”

The devices or sheets of glass will of course continue to be an area for innovation, but as Professor Sawhney describes above — the paradigm shift to the new AI world is here. Currently, we are in the dawn of this new era where components of the AI world are developing.

AI and machine intelligence is of course a broad field, but let’s focus in on AI related to mobile computing and consumer facing products. The pinnacle of computing is when technology is performing tasks efficiently and with little or no human interaction — for me, this is a self-driving technology.

Alright, so let’s dig deeper into which pillars and technologies of AI that will achieve the self-driving label.

To outline the power of such device, I see the following scenario in this new world:

I’ve left my phone at home and would be simply be wearing an Apple Watch throughout the day — which is my link back to the phone.

Natural Language Processing

At the core of intelligent agents is language processing or understanding. My phone at home receives the following text message:

Coming to the birthday party tonight?

My phone processes the device data consisting of text messages and emails (yes, it’s creepy but necessary), to determine that I’ve already purchased a gift on Amazon for the party.

Yes, see you at 8!

A precursor to this independent AI technology exists in GMail with Smart Reply.

When I return home, the phone has listed all of the smart replies where I can review for any potential changes.

Computer Vision

The next pillar is vision, similar to natural language processing, innovation in computer vision in recent years has been elevated by deep learning and neural networks.

My sister sends me a text message:

Can you send me pics from the birthday party last night?

Google photos using the product’s excellent search and image recognition technology, returns a set of photos from my device (tagged with the appropriate location and timestamps) directly to my sister via text message. Perhaps a confirmation request is sent to my Apple Watch prior to releasing the photos, but most of the heavy lifting is done at this point.

General AI

The layer that resides above the core technologies consists of various AI and machine learning algorithms to activate the self-driving behaviour. Whether it be a recommendation engine to suggest dinner ideas based on a signal such as an outgoing text message, “not sure what to do for dinner tonight” or an always-on microphone listening to this discussion in the home.

While I’m out for my jog with the Apple Watch, the phone is busy gathering appropriate notifications using this top layer when I return:

Google is driving innovation where AI-based software and agents the vector of differentiation which is clearly demonstrated on the Google Pixel 2. The components of a self-driving phone are in development, I see myself leaving the device at home to handle my life and tasks.

Rob Sandhu

Creator of Weather Hippie