When you were a kid and you thought of artificial intelligence (AI), you probably thought of human-like robots assisting actual humans with household tasks.
However, the reality of artificial intelligence today is much more pervasive and integrated into our environments—not as visible robots, but as an invisible network in our devices. We are closer than ever to imagining AI as an operating system, a step beyond AI integration that enables us to run our daily lives and work more effectively by connecting devices and allowing them to communicate with one another without our intervention. It will alter how we and our technology interact with one another and with one another.
What exactly does that look like?
In this article, I explain what an AI OS is and introduce the ways it’s shaping our digital future.
Understanding AI Operating Systems
Before I explain how artificial intelligence as an operating system is shaping future technologies, you need to know what an AI OS is and how it’s different from the operating systems you know and use today.
What exactly is an AI OS? AI operating systems are built on top of AI hardware and AI capabilities so that they can learn, change, and get better over time based on user input and data. The aim is to provide a more intuitive, personalized, and efficient computing experience by using advanced AI algorithms, large language models, and machine learning techniques.
Imagine if an AI operating system connected all of your devices. That operating system would actively enhance your day-to-day experience by collecting data from each device and learning from it. It might make use of the following data types, and what it might do with them is as follows: Sleep Data (from devices like the Oura Ring): This would include details about sleep duration, quality, and patterns.
Calendar Data (from services like Google Calendar):
Information about scheduled appointments, daily routines, and important events.
Steps, heart rate, exercise sessions, and dietary habits from wearables and health apps are examples of health and fitness data. Patterns in communication frequency, the sentiment of messages, and networking habits can be found in communication data gathered from social media, messaging apps, and emails. Environmental data from smart home devices include preferences for temperature, lighting, and even appliance usage times. Before you get too excited, this AI operating system does not yet exist. At the moment, we have AI-powered operating systems only which integrate some AI functions but aren’t as autonomous.
What distinguishes AI OS from conventional and AI-powered operating systems? The degree to which AI is present or not in its core functionality is what differentiates AI as OS from traditional AI-powered OS. Your traditional operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, or Linux, provide a basic framework for managing hardware and running applications. They rely on pre-defined rules and algorithms to perform tasks.
For instance, when you save a file to your desktop on your computer. AI isn’t used to complete or improve these tasks in a traditional operating system. With AI-powered OSs, like iOS or Android, AI features and AI hardware are incorporated into a traditional OS framework. Examples of those features are an AI assistant like Siri or facial recognition.
Now, when we examine an AI operating system, the AI is at its center. Optimizing performance, providing intelligent recommendations, and automating tasks are all possible outcomes of its capacity to continuously learn from and adapt to user preferences and behavior.