Making Disrupted Business Intelligence (BI) Truly Conversational
Humans can readily recognize a few thousand kinds of things—roughly the number of picturable nouns in human languages. Lower animals likely distinguish vastly fewer kinds of things. But if we’re trying to achieve “human-like” image identification—and effectively map images to words that exist in human languages—then this defines a certain scale of problem, which, it appears, can be solved with a “human-scale” neural network. Transformation is nothing but evolution in a time-lapse. AI having humanlike ability to sense, learn, think, interact and take actions is one expected form of such transformation. It is happening and most companies are trying to do what makes sense.
We have a lot of artificial intelligence and disrupted business intelligence startups to thank for showing us what is possible but speed and scale together are very difficult. Technology is still an enabler and not an end in itself for most of the global economy. It doesn’t make sense to shoot for the “possible” when the possible is constantly shifting. With funds like the USD 100 billion Softbank Vision Fund, a whole lot of money is going this way.
Kurzweil, now a director of engineering at Google, embraces such a future; he is perhaps the most famous of the techno-utopians, for he believes that technological progress will culminate in a merger of human and machine intelligence. AI is going to change the way we do a lot of things. In future chat bots and virtual assistants will in demand. Businesses need to prepare to use people for EI matters, and let AI get some of the process work done.
Considering the promising past performance in creating technological skill sets, all eyes are now on India. Big-name scientists worry that runaway artificial intelligence could pose a threat to humanity. Among them is the influential 42-year-old philosopher Nick Bostrom who favors the creation of “superintelligent” computers, but only if done with great vigilance, with safeguards to ensure that the machines do not escape human control and pose an existential threat to humanity.
Artificial intelligence in common language is when computers behave like humans i.e. it can understand, reasons, learns and interacts. AI can help in developing customer insights from this large pool of data as well as can perform complex analytical tasks at much faster pace than the humans could ever perform. It’s not that the companies are not analyzing customer data but AI adds an intelligence layer to big data, which gives its ability to do it on a much bigger scale.
AI is one of these fields that is so easy for the general public and popular culture to misinterpret and extrapolate way beyond reality. All tech giants including Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple, Facebook and Salesforce are all competing in the race to acquire private AI companies. Recently, Intel also started an initiative to train 15,000 professionals on AI technologies and machine learning in India. Intel aims to fix the biggest problem in AI space which could restrain the growth and that is the lack of skilled workforce in the artificial intelligence sector. Over 30 years ago, AI was the big thing – computers would be able to reason and become so smart they would think for us. In reality, we got a paper-clip that nobody could use and lately Siri. So as usual, what people pass as disruptive technology is nothing more than evolutionary and gradual improvements to old technology.
It was 19th October 2016 and the occasion was the opening ceremony of the Leverhulme Centre for Future of Intelligence in the United Kingdom when one of the greatest scientist of this decade, Professor Stephen Hawking warned the generation that the artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”. While addressing the guest, he acclaimed “Artificial Intelligence could lead to the destruction of humanity. It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.
