Futures of artificial intelligence through technology readiness levels

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers the potential to transform our lives in radical ways. However, the main unanswered questions about this foreseen transformation are its depth, breadth and timelines. To answer them, not only do we lack the tools to determine what achievements will be attained in the near future, but we even ignore what various technologies in present-day AI are capable of. Many so-called breakthroughs in AI are associated with highly-cited research papers or good performance in some particular benchmarks. However, research breakthroughs do not directly translate into a technology that is ready to use in real-world environments. In this paper, we present a novel exemplar-based methodology to categorise and assess several AI technologies, by mapping them onto Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) (representing their depth in maturity and availability). We first interpret the nine TRLs in the context of AI, and identify several categories in AI to which they can be assigned. We then introduce a generality dimension, which represents increasing layers of breadth of the technology. These two dimensions lead to the new readiness-vs-generality charts, which show that higher TRLs are achievable for low-generality technologies, focusing on narrow or specific abilities, while high TRLs are still out of reach for more general capabilities. We include numerous examples of AI technologies in a variety of fields, and show their readiness-vs-generality charts, serving as exemplars. Finally, we show how the timelines of several AI technology exemplars at different generality layers can help forecast some short-term and mid-term trends for AI.