Artificial intelligence swarms Silicon Valley on wings and wheels

For more than a decade, technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie.

The new era centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial Internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally.

The shift was evident in a Lowe’s home improvement store this month, when a prototype inventory checker developed by Bossa Nova Robotics silently glided through the aisles using computer vision to automatically perform a task humans have done manually for centuries.

“We saw a slow trickle in investments in robotics, and suddenly, boom — there seem to be a dozen companies securing large investment rounds focusing on specific robotic niches,” said Martin Hitch, CEO of Bossa Nova, which has offices in San Francisco and Pittsburgh.

“Whenever there is a new idea, the valley swarms it,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, a chipmaker that was founded to make graphic processors for the video game business but that has turned decisively toward artificial intelligence applications in the past year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently appeared at the Aspen Ideas Conference and called for a partnership between humans and artificial intelligence systems in which machines are designed to augment humans.

Both technology and car companies say that powerful sensors and artificial intelligence software will enable cars to drive themselves with the push of a button, perhaps by the end of this decade — despite recent Tesla crashes that have raised the question of how quickly human drivers will be completely replaced by the technology.

The area’s tendency toward Zelig-like reinvention dates back to the its initial emergence from the ashes of a deep aerospace industry recession as a consumer-electronics manufacturing center producing memory chips, video games and digital watches in the mid-1970s.

A malaise in the personal computing market in the early 1990s was followed by the World Wide Web and the global expansion of the consumer Internet.

A decade later, in 2007, just as innovation in mobile phones seemed to be on the verge of moving away from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia, Apple introduced the first iPhone, resetting the mobile communications marketplace and ensuring that the region would — for at least another generation — remain the world’s innovation center.

In the most recent shift, artificial intelligence emerged in Canada in the work of cognitive scientists and computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun during the previous decade.

John Shoch, a veteran venture capitalist at Alloy Ventures in Palo Alto, said deep learning has made a difference to the potential success of artificial intelligence companies.

[...] like Jerry Kaplan, who helped found two artificial intelligence companies in the 1980s — Symantec, which became a security company, and Teknowledge, which ultimately shut down — the new enthusiasm is troubling because it suggests an unfounded optimism similar to earlier eras in which the field overpromised and underdelivered.