BERLIN --The auto industry, with its growing complexity, offers "nearly perfect conditions for applied artificial intelligence," VW Group CIO Martin Hofmann said Thursday.
The German carmaker, is involved with various projects all aimed at implementing new AI Technologies. These should be used to complement human workers and not take their place, Hofmann said.
"Algorithms should not replace humans, but should take over assignments that cannot be solved by humans," he said.
The VW executive expressed optimism about the technology's potential. "AI will make completely new things possible," he said.
Hofmann cited inspiration from Isaac Asimov's 1950 book "I, Robot," which described a future with multitude of tasks assumed by robots. Asimov stated three basic principles for robots: They should never injure humans, obey orders and protect their own existence. These three principles also broadly apply to AI, Hofmann said.
The VW CIO also discussed the potential of Quantum computing-based machine learning, a new area that would allow machine learning to progress faster than is currently possible. Such an approach could help deal with growing data volumes in the auto industry.
AI can also help when relatively few data are available for analysis, Hofmann said.