Probably the most underestimated and misrepresented field of science. When people write scripts for hollywood or books they intend for the "solutions" to usually backfire on humanity and cause more problems, to generally stimulate people's emotions, otherwise it would be boring. It's kinda of like the desktop computer has gone from the 64k commodore 25 years ago to a world wide library of living knowledge, yet our desktops are not going to rise up against us any time soon. It is clear in most people's minds that they can only do what we program them to do, so there is this hollywood version of future robots who can think like people and have emotions and then there is the real version which is people will build robots to do their work, to be versatile and programmable, like the desktop but a machine that interfaces with the environment.
The first people or company to develop this technology, which is already there but hasn't been fully put together and implemented, will be making user-programmable robots for the entire world, and nearly everyone will demand them far more than computers & internet. Here's why, you buy a 20k dollar robot just like a car, it's a tool to get you somewhere, only this robot can be programmed to do anything by watching you do something and then with voice recognition you tell it what to do, it learns to imitate you to achieve a desired goal by trial and error and whatnot, that means you can teach it to garden and pick your berry farm for instance and pay for itself within the first year maybe...what does that mean? It's the realization of mankind's ultimate dream to own slaves to do their work without the remorse. The degree to which this could improve the world is beyond our present realization. This technology is some of the most self-repaying technology that can be developed or bought. There is no end to what this can do, robots can be built that just repair other robots and lifetime warranty factories that are built by robots and so on. You could tell you robot to do this thing everyday at 6:00, except on sundays and holidays or unless I say otherwise, and do that thing like make a random supper meal at 7:00 and they would never forget these things and learn as they go and get better at doing them and more valuable.
The key elements are this:
-Human like form of robot hardware. So it can interact with all of our machinery and use it as we do such as a hand saw or doorknob or a tractor car or ladder, in any case the human form and hand has a proven track record in versatility and manipulation of the environment.
-voice and language recognition software. This is already done somewhat, but it hasn't reached the point where we can talk to our computers instead of typing yet, or if our computer doesn't understand a word or what we are saying we can use other words for them and define it so they learn it, so that we don't have to say "walk to the mailbox directly and get the mail out of the box then walk back here and put it on this table anywhere on the table", we eventually can just say "get the mail everyday".
-Visual recognition software. Already somewhat done, but again not to the point that we can teach a robot to sort threw say trash for scrap metals and paper or plastic recycling, a very dangerous job to humans btw.
-Adaptive learning software. This is beyond my expertise, but basically when people say AI I think they are trying too hard imo or looking too far into the future, if we break down learning into it's fundamental parts it's not so complex, it's that we see only the whole of simple parts put together in ourselves that make it complicated. One of the main abilities of intelligence is imitation(monkey see monkey do), and making a software program that can imitate very complex actions and adapt and learn to achieve some goal better shouldn't be that hard...combine that with a form and visual and language software that is easily user-programmable and I think you'd really have something there. We might even make "imitation suits" so that you can get into a jumpsuit and plug in virtual reality headgear and operate your robot like yourself, and teach it directly what to do.
