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Articial intelligence is currently attracting
considerable interest and attention from industry,
researchers, governments as well as investors,
who are pouring record amounts of money into the
development of new machine learning technologies
and applications. Increasingly sophisticated
algorithms are being employed to support human
activity, not only in forecasting tasks but also in
making actual decisions that impact society,
businesses and individuals. Whether in the
manufacturing sector, where robots are adapting
their behaviour to work alongside humans, or in the
home environment, where refrigerators order food
supplies based on the homeowner’s preferences,
articial intelligence is continuously making inroads
into domains previously reserved to human skills,
judgment or decision-making.
While articial intelligence has the potential to
help address some of humanity’s most pressing
challenges, such as the depletion of environmental
resources, the growth and aging of the world’s
population, or the ght against poverty, the
increasing use of machines to help humans make
adequate decisions is also generating a number
of risks and threats that businesses, governments
and policy makers need to understand and
tackle carefully. New concerns related to safety,
security, privacy, trust, and ethical considerations
in general are denitely emerging together with
the technological innovations enabled by articial
intelligence. These challenges are common to all
societies across the globe and will need to be dealt
with at the international level.
The present White Paper provides a framework
for understanding where articial intelligence
stands today and what could be the outlook for its
development in the next 5 to 10 years. Based on an
explanation of current technological capabilities,
it describes the main systems, techniques and
algorithms that are in use today and indicates
what kinds of problems they typically help to solve.
Adopting an industrial perspective, the White Paper
discusses in greater detail four application domains
offering extensive opportunities for the deployment
of articial intelligence technologies: smart homes,
intelligent manufacturing, smart transportation and
self-driving vehicles, and the energy sector.
The analysis of various specic use cases pertaining
to these four domains provides clear evidence that
articial intelligence can be implemented across
and benet a wide set of industries. This potential is
paving the way for articial intelligence to become
an essential part of the equation in resolving issues
generated by today’s and tomorrow’s megatrends.
Building upon this analysis, the White Paper
provides a detailed description of some of the
major existing and future challenges that articial
intelligence will have to address. While industry and
the research community constitute the principal
drivers for developing initiatives to tackle technical
challenges related to data, algorithms, hardware
and computing infrastructures, governments and
regulators urgently need to elaborate new policies
to deal with some of the most critical ethical and
social issues foreseen to be the by-products of
articial intelligence.
Standardization and conformity assessment are
expected to play an essential role not only in driving
market adoption of articial intelligence but also in
mitigating some of the most pressing challenges
related to decision-making by machines. As a
leading organization providing a unique mix of
standardization and conformity assessment
capabilities for industrial and information technology
systems, the IEC is ideally positioned to address
some of these challenges at the international level.
Executive summary
