In this article, I'm going to tell you about automating corporate strategies using artificial intelligence, and look at some recent progress in automatically generating strategies in the face of uncertainty.
Every day, progress in artificial intelligence is addressing tasks currently performed only by humans, and it's worthwhile to take a short-term view of what this all means to your company.
Games like chess have been tackled by artificial intelligence with amazing results, but there was this big gap between those games - where everything about the game state and consequences is known before making a decision - and the reality of life where, like poker, there is only a little bit of information available to the decision-makers, and the quality and quantity of information used to make decisions varies wildly. We humans face this situation of high uncertainty every time we cross the street or eat a hamburger, but it doesn't seem to bother us. Until recently, computers have had a lot of trouble dealing with games that give the decision-maker incomplete information about the state of the game. Also, developing strategies in real-time is harder than deciding if you want to bet or fold. Strategic plans can have multiple steps that need to be properly sequenced, and these plans can include contingency plans.
Artificial intelligence is very hyped up, and for good reasons, but many pop culture information sources lose the "how" of it all, and instead focus in on the dream of what may come next, in some far-off future. Vaporware is common in the industry. It's not a good state of affairs because regular people don't see the connection between the research and the resulting products, and people fear what they don't understand.
I am a practitioner in the artificial intelligence field, and my problem with futurism fever is an endless focus on the distant future devoid of a simple and rational view of reality in the here and now. The tyranny of the rocket equation held back the futuristic promises of spaceflight for a generation, and the progress of artificial intelligence is similarly limited by the inertia that all disruptive technology faces. The fear of change brought on by progress in the artificial intelligence field should not lead society directly to extreme solutions like universal basic income or strong regulation of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence as it is developed today, is primarily programming, data gathering, and mathematics. It isn't sexy and it works poorly at first. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. The scary results you see in demonstrations are the product of a lot of hard work to hide the shortcomings of a narrow machine intelligence. I like to think of the artificial intelligence field like "Charlotte's Web", in the sense that Wilbur (the artificial intelligence agent) gets all of the attention at the fair, but Charlotte (the programmer) stays up all night spinning the web. When Wilbur gets all the attention at the fair, as was intended, you have to ask yourself what exactly the pig did to deserve the attention. Why didn't the farmer market a magic spider instead of a magic pig? Well, the short answer is that the marketers want to promote pigs, but the deeper answer is that too few information sources are looking behind the curtain to explain the reason for the cool demo, ruining the magic trick but enlightening the audience.
I don't mean to give "real" futurists a hard time though. Nick Bostrom's excellent book "Superintelligence" is worth reading, and even just a watch of his TED talk on the potential future dangers of artificial intelligence could change the way you think about these things. Real research is ongoing on the far future of artificial intelligence, on things like the singularity, and artificial general intelligence, but that is simply not
relevant to your real life right now. It might be someday, but it isn't today.
