These places don't strike me as very "surprising." If we wanted to talk "surprising," we should be looking at the more offbeat, but nevertheless plausible sourc

These places don't strike me as very "surprising." If we wanted to talk "surprising," we should be looking at the more offbeat, but nevertheless plausible sources: 1) Logistics & transportation. Inventory/warehouse management, traffic management systems, shipping, autonomous cars and even roads, etc. 2) Intelligence. Both industrial and government-oriented. Heavy investment is being made in semantic/parsing algorithms, pattern matching, and analysis. 3) Medical research. New drugs are already being invented by combinatory programs. But there are still a lot of inefficiencies in the system, because it's basically the throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. There are billions of dollars to be made by the company who can develop a smarter combinatory program, and no doubt billions being invested in the effort to do so. Also: robotic surgery and medicine -- though that's more robotics than AI, per se. 4) Weather modeling and prediction. As the global climate and weather become less predictable, the challenge of prediction grows increasingly computationally complex (and more economically valuable). I would expect huge investment in this area in the future, if it's not happening already. At the end of the day, AI seems most likely to emerge in the places where a) the difficulty of the problem at hand far surpasses humans' best efforts; b) the need for speed or scale cannot be accommodated by human effort; c) the economic upside is enormous (ergo, incentives for R&D expenditures); d) the nature of the problem is best solved by a "superhuman" intelligence model, i.e., a model of computation resembling the way the human brain thinks about problems, but more robust -- something requiring creativity, problem solving, and working memory at enormous scale.