"More Human than Human" is a slogan from the iconic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K Dick, and memorialized in the film Blade Runner. If you want an honest vision of what the future of artificial intelligence could be--good, bad and ugly Blade Runner is a realistic start. Human and android love affairs, killer robots in space, Bladerunner detectives hunting down the rogue AI's...well you get the picture even without seeing the directors cut of the film.
The reality of today, that every person, business and nation must deal with, is the emergence of AI as a competitive advantage. Those that have it will gain a vital global strategic advantage over others. Ai will realign power, influence, relationships and most of all change the competitive landscape. Those nations, companies and individuals that harness AI faster then their competitors will have almost an unfair advantage. If you think about similar strategic advantages from the use of steel to computers you can start to see the important nature of this shift. Welcome to the future shaped by AI.
No one is ready for the future of AI that is coming faster then anyone can imagine. Not in ten or twenty years, no its emerging NOW. And AI will change not just everything but everyone. AI will be a culture shift of huge proportions. AI-as-a-Deliverable over the global mobile web cloud will be a game-changer as you will be able to to access massive yodabytes of intelligence anywhere or anytime.
What I mean by AI, is the entire suite of emerging smart technologies--from deep learning, neural networks, machine intelligence, computational intelligence, expert systems and evolutionary and computational intelligence. AI is the core tech behind drones, robotics, weapons, medical tech and self-serving cars. Smart supercomputers that have the capacity to learn, mine, connect and predict the future of anything--from stock trades, to energy prices, to become virtual docs or androids that go to space or go to the supermarket. They are all coming soon.
There will be many companies that don't get the AI innovation thing. They will be late to the party. Still looking in the rear view mirror. If your still struggling with the digital enterprise and social media revolution. If you still think Twitter and Snapchat is for someone else then you will miss the AI revolution. Yes it's a revolution. The automation of predictive analytics, big data and cloud computing are just the infrastructure of AI. AI will shape the future of how companies market, how health care is delivered, how energy is invented and even, though not popular, how wars will be won.
Predicting the future is the inevitable end game for AI. Predicting desire and translating that into products and services, into bots and androids, virtual to physical artificial intelligence as a deliverable will transform our world not in twenty years but now.
There are justifiable concerns about AI taking human jobs, but we will examine that later on. Yes it will happen. Jobs will be lost. And new jobs to control, program, teach and enable or protect humans from AI.
The future is now.
Today there are ten companies spending over $5 billion, ten more nations spending another $10 billon, working on designing the next generation of AI that will reshape health care, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics, consumer marketing and financial services such as the trading of equities, insurance and real estate. Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Qualcomm, IBM, Sony and this is just the known players driving the AI revolution.
What might be? What could we imagine? Wars fought by fully autonomous Ai. Energy managed by only AI as humans cannot manage the complexity. DocBots that treat you anywhere on the planet. Virtual and robotic teachers that bring a first class Harvard education to everyone that wants it. Crime eliminated as RoboCops keep the peace.
How about a near future world where a Global Autonomous Economy, run by Ai's enable people to work less and enjoy life more. Where incomes are auto-generated by massive Big Data Clouds of AI's that pay out like sovereign wealth funds to citizens and stockholders. Where Ai's lead geo-engineering to protect the environment and do good?
There is also the distinct probability that AI will go rogue somewhere and at sometime. We could blame the human programmers but the risk factors that will create a battle between AI's over markets, energy, commodities, territories or over knowledge and power--this too is in our near future. The Big Data tools that will become smarter will also threaten, harm and coerce. We want to be Future Ready for this future.
Though I think we will need AI to help, it is inevitable that AI will commit harm, either by negligence, intent or via the manipulation of other AI's or those pesky humans. More Human Then Human in the shadow of AI, perhaps we will meet our destiny.
Back to the now. Businesses that automate their work processes that are transforming their organizations by applying machine intelligence and AI today will be the winners. Those that see the future of data science is fundamentally about AI; next gen smarter technology to predict the future of what customers, competitors and even their employees will want, will have a signifiant edge as AI becomes a competitive advantage that no company can ignore.
Resistance is not Future Smart. Learn AI. Embrace the future.