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MARCH 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 15 this year. They had already made a preliminary decision and when reviewing their reasoning with one of their committee members, I had to agree with their preliminary choice. They are going to install Amazon Alexa in their units. Amazon's Echo line, powered by Alexa, holds 70% of the smart speaker market right now in early 2018 and could add $10 billion the com- pany's top line by 2020 (Figure 6). It is rumored that Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana AT assis- tant will partner making them a very strong, perhaps dominant, presence. Additionally, Al- phabet is using its own AI, Google Assistant, to power its competing line, so the smart speaker rivalry is only going to grow. There are concerns regarding AI, however. Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc. and founder of Space-X, has stated on multi- ple occasions that he is concerned that artificial intelligence could eventually be dangerous to people—and to humanity as a whole. In ad- dition, Stephen Hawking has said he believes AI systems will eliminate many jobs, and not create enough to replace them. Specifically, he said (per International Busi - ness Times), "The auto- mation of factories has al- ready decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial in- telligence is likely to ex- tend this job destruction deep into the middle class- es, with only the most car- ing, creative or superviso- ry roles remaining." In the short term, ex- pect artificial intelligence to do…intelligent things, such as control driv- erless cars. Machine learning (ML) systems will do product recommendations. Logistics com- panies are already using AI and ML to identi- fy the best routes, and it is easy to see a time when public taxis, buses and trains will rely on AI to adjust routes and schedules as necessary and to improve efficiency. Along with driver- less cars, driverless buses and taxies are on the way, and drone package delivery, which is al- ready being tested, may have public sector ap- plications as well. Some researchers expect artificial intelli- gence systems to be only fractionally as smart as a human for the next 10–15 years. But things may start to get a little awkward midcentury when AI could start performing nearly all the tasks humans do—and do them much better, faster, more error-free. Perhaps they may start to conclude that it (AI) is smarter than the di- rectives and limitations set upon it by its hu- man inventors/controllers. For now, what does the average person do regarding AI? I suggest choosing your AI devic- es wisely. Is the smart home just "Big Broth- er" under a different name? From a financial perspective, you might also wish to do some due diligence and decide to invest in the com- panies who are leading in this arena; some of them may equate it to investing in IBM in the '50s, or Apple or Microsoft in the '90s. Another potentially disruptive technology is based on nanocrystal technology. A nano- crystal can be defined as a crystalline particle with at least one dimension measuring less than 1000 nanometers (nm). (1 nm is defined as 1 thousand-millionth of a meter [10 -9 m].) Nanocrystals have a growing list of proven ap- plications, with some already proven and in use such as in flexible solar panels. For exam- ple, they can be suspended in liquid and lit- erally painted on to a wall or roof to create a solar- generating surface. They have also been used in the manufacture of filters that refine crude oil into diesel fuel. There are many possi - ble uses such as flat panel Figure 5: NVIDIA's video on AI (see reference #2). Figure 6: Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot.