Days later my ears are still ringing from the booming baritone of the public-address announcer in the keynote session on the first morning at the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas. I keep wondering when the humming will subside, but with it a single thought continues to linger from the presentation that was delivered by IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty. That was the discussion point of the ethics of artificial intelligence or AI.
Now this is not to say AI in the sense of the cute emoji that you may have made of your face on your mobile device. No, this is talking about AI that is managing the ebb and flow of the global supply chain or managing the routing of bags for your rebooked flights, as an example. Not some garden variety cruft.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a system that demonstrates traits that can mirror human intelligence in some form or another. These traits can be associated with problem solving, manipulation of informational inputs, or in some cases can even mimic creativity. Obviously, your mileage may vary.
AI is a type of intelligence that often evokes the specter of the movie Terminator. While this draconian post-apocalyptic vision of the future is what most think of when the subject of AI comes up, it really does do us a disservice. Case in point is Watson from IBM. This is an AI platform that can be trained to, as an example, ingest a request for a proposal document (RFP) and respond. Rather cool when you think of it.
Now, in my days as a defender, I would have loved to have something like Watson as a SaaS offer that could do the inverse. Whereby I mean, it would read an RFP response from a vendor and for every time the wrong company was referred to in the document it would send 30 pizzas with anchovies to the CEO of that vendor’s house. While I’m being facetious, it was really amazing to see how often that would happen in my past roles.
RFP’s are just one example. With all of that data processing there inevitably comes the question of how the data is going to be handled and secured. Data stewardship and the accountability for data is of paramount importance to do business today. Unfortunately, for many enterprises that have built up over the years, this has not always been the case.
