Age of AI: Your smartphone will be smarter than you by 2017!

“Smartphones are becoming smarter, and will be smarter than you by 2017,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

Sounds like a doomsday prophesy, doesn’t it? You expect Arnold Schwarzenegger to walk in any moment offering to save you or kill you depending on what your favourite movie is in the franchise.

But the idea of intelligent personal devices isn’t new. And the wait for a truly intelligent, intuitive and cognizant personal device may not actually be that far away.

In fact, the first of the future breed of intelligent-phones is quiet possibly already here - the Moto X from Motorola (brains by Google).

Now wait. This isn’t an advertorial for the phone but a simple illustration of where the future of personal cellular devices is heading.

“If there is heavy traffic, it [your smartphone> will wake you up early for a meeting with your boss, or simply send an apology if it is a meeting with your colleague,” said Milanesi. “The smartphone will gather contextual information from its calendar, its sensors, the user’s location and personal data.”

By this criteria, the Moto X is practically there. A device filled with sensors, background processes and genuinely useful voice activated features, the Moto X comes with active features that can change your phone’s behaviour depending on your actions.

If you are in a meeting it WILL set your phone to silent mode, if you miss a call it WILL automatically reply on your behalf (with messages suitable for the caller; friend vs. boss), it detects motion so if you’re driving it WILL read out your texts so you don’t have to risk your safety.

The intelligent smartphone revolution has already begun.

“Mobile phones have turned into smartphones thanks to two things: technology and apps,” said Ms. Milanesi. “Technology has added features such as cameras, locations and sensors, while apps have connected those to an array of functions that, for the most part, add and improve our day to day life from a social, knowledge, entertainment and productivity point of view.”

The intelligent and contextual interaction between the user’s environment and the device behaviour is one of the benefits of cognizant computing. A long time in the coming, it is the natural next step in the evolution of personal technology.

Instead of relying on the brute power of the device alone, cognizant technology uses intelligent applications on mid-range hardware to connect users along multiple platforms though cloud services effectively creating a seamless user experience. Your technological personality travels with you where you ago, acting in your best interests.

Picture this:

You come home, your phone communicates with the technology in the door and allows entry via fingerprint authentication, and if stranger knocks on the door, a video streams from your lobby camera direct to your screen. With a public social media profile for your scrutiny.

You come to work, the office recognizes your device after fingerprint authentication and connects you to the system granting access to all data and settings. Your calendar has a presentation scheduled so the phone automatically connects and uploads to the projector, and you are good to go.

You borrow a tablet to run the presentation from your friend and it becomes your tablet since it has synced all your personal settings and data from the cloud and authenticated from your phone.

You get the picture.

Alright, just one more example.

In a supermarket, the GPS in your phone senses your location and contextually recognizes your shopping list from the notes. It flashes you a reminder and (if you have allowed it the permission of course) it orders the items from the retailer’s website for you. As per your past taste preference of course.

“One of the defining experiences of cognizant computing is that the devices that drive the experience fall into what we refer to as the invisible space. We define this as the combination of devices and services that unite to form an experience that is below the daily threshold of awareness,” said Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner. “In practice, consumers will forget the devices are being carried, worn or used until they need to interact with them for control or to obtain feedback in terms of data or information.”

This next step is only around the corner. Wearable devices like the Samsung Galaxy Gear are already exploring the new space and Google’s long awaited Glass bring us closer to what was once considered science fiction. By connecting to the power house of your smartphones with your personal data and preferences from the cloud, your personal device becomes command central for all your tech needs.

As users continue to share their personal preferences with their technology, the ability of devices to enhance life flow activities becomes exponentially greater.

All the check-ins at hangouts and work events, online reviews of restaurants and movies, book and music selections, as well as interaction patterns with people on social media and real life meetings allow the technology to better anticipate and predict your needs.

“We assume that apps will acquire knowledge over time and get better with improved predictions of what users need and want, with data collection and response happening in real-time,” said Ms. Milanesi.

As device manufacturers like Samsung, Apple and Google attempt to normalize the costs of these revolutionary technologies the consumer adoption rates will surely rise. Issues of privacy and trust in technology will remain an ongoing concern as they have with every upgrade in technological conveniences from the telephone to social media.

But as the case of social media and online retail shopping trends demonstrates; users discover a balance between sacrificing privacy in exchange of valuable services. And that value is what inevitably makes innovative technology a seamless part of day to day life.