Augmented Intelligence in Scholarly Communication: The Machine as Reader

What might some of the early applications/uses of machine intelligence be? In the consumer space we are already seeing some. I sat next to someone on Friday who was carrying on what seemed to be a conversation with Siri about Superbowl statistics. And we are seeing the beginnings of autonomous-acting vehicles (self-parking, and highway-self-driving cars). And there now seem to be a thousand flowers blooming:

Image courtesy of Shivon Zilis in “The current state of machine intelligence 2.0“

In scholarly communication, I expect that early applications will be targeted to either niche subject domains — databases that are focused on a specific area, e.g., drug interactions — or niche tasks — e.g., alerting on literature I should read, based on my specific interests. Google Scholar already has an excellent alerting system that builds its profile of my interests off of my what I have written. It might be a big step to expand its comprehension of my interests to cover what I read as well. Some are working on this problem.