I thinks that's a very good question. I can name countless cases of "semi-trivial" AI being used to improve people's lives. Tree/graph searches, linear regress

I thinks that's a very good question. I can name countless cases of "semi-trivial" AI being used to improve people's lives. Tree/graph searches, linear regression and clustering algorithms are used all over the place: in science, engineering and medical field. However, when it comes to more sophisticated algorithms I am hard pressed to point out strongly positive use cases. I.e. something that actually make a positive impact for large groups of people, isn't a gimmick and does not involves massive privacy violations. Hm, I guess handwriting recognition is used by postal services. There are a lot of expert systems running behind the scenes in some industries (stuff that involves logistics, for example). Voice recognition helps disabled people to interact with computers. Machine translation can be useful at times. Although I've never been a situation when it made any significant difference in my life or in lives of anyone I know. Stuff like face detection in cameras or voice recognition in phones and cars seem cool, but nothing would really change if they weren't available. The most impactful uses of fancy AI that I know involves marketing and surveillance, and I don't consider either of those uses as a positive thing.