As artificial intelligence tools become smarter and easier to use, the threat that they may take human jobs is real. They might also just make people much better at what they do, revolutionizing the workday for many.

“What a bulldozer was to physical labor, AI is to data and to thought labor,” said Naveen Rao (pictured), vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence solutions at Intel.

Rao told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during South by Southwest in Austin, that there are many examples of how AI can help streamline processes; one would be an insurance firm needing to read millions of pages of text to assess risk. (* Disclosure below.)

“I can’t do that very easily, right? I have to have a team of analysts run through, write summaries — these are the kinds of problems we can start to attack,” he said. AI can turn a computer into a “data inference machine,” not just a way to automate compute tasks, he added.

Improved user interfaces are driving the democratization of AI for people doing regular jobs, Rao pointed out. A major example of how AI can bring a technology to the masses is the iPod, which in turn informed the smartphone.

“Storing music in a digital form in a small device was around before the iPod, but when they made it easy to use, that sort of gave rise to the smartphone,” Rao said.

The Jetsons?

Rao sees fascinating advances in AI robot development, driven in part by 3D printing and the “maker revolution” lowering mechanical costs.

“That, combined with these techniques becoming mature, is going to come up with some really cool stuff. We’re going to start seeing The Jetsons kind of thing,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the South by SouthWest (SXSW). (*Disclosure: Intel sponsors some SXSW segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE