I recently attended SUNZ 2018.
Mike Frost – Director, Product Management at SAS, spoke on Getting Automated Outcomes in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. As well as being a sassy dresser Mike spoke highly of AI and that it was the way of the future, but also had a warning that new ways of doing things comes with new risks and new risks therefore need new processes to manage them.
He used the analogy of child burning hand it’s hand on a stove. A wood fired stove where the child learns that the smell of smoke and fire requires caution because it might be hot. Then as technology moves to electric and then gas the child must adapt to new risks and processes.
Mike had a concise definition of AI and a few warnings.
AI is the science of training systems to emulate human tasks through learning and automation. With AI, machines can (1) learn from experience, (2) adjust to new inputs and (3) accomplish specific tasks without manual intervention.
Some of the less obvious things we should worry about with AI
- Lose competitive edge
- Miss market trends
- Reduced customer engagement
There are aways some of us that have that “end of world” mentality.
- Massive job loss
- Robots replace humans
- We lose control
Mike also listed many opportunities with AI, but I won’t dwell on these other than to list a couple.
- Efficiency in process
- Process elimination
- New capabilities
Mike then joined a panel of other industry leaders to talk about ethics and how this fits with Artificial Intelligence. The underlying theme being that AI and humans need to work together to get the best result. The sum is greater than the two individual parts. So if we combine the power and speed of machines with the intuition, empathy and common sense of humans we can take a giant leap forward in our development without compromising on our ethics along the way.
Shane out.
