How Intelligent is Artificial Intelligence today?

October 31, 2018 | Colleen O’ Connell-Campbell


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HAL is the computer-turned-killer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. While 2001 has come and gone without the threat of a HAL, Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction. And so far, we’re finding many benefits from the machine learning that’s been developed.

In June 2018, RBC Capital Markets published an extensive report entitled Imagine 2025. Part of the report covers The Artificial Intelligence Race and urges us to pay attention, not just as investors, but as consumers, entrepreneurs, and business owners. If you’re interested, I can provide you with a copy of Imagine 2025. Email me for your hard copy.  (FYI – it’s 180 + pages in length!)

If a 180-page report is a little heavy for Book Club, allow me to give you a shorter overview:

Right now, industry insiders are talking about the emergence of three types of AI. We’re currently still at Stage One.

1. Narrow AI.

This stage involves programming a computer to carry out a single activity. The benefit comes when a computer can carry out that automated task more efficiently than humans. We’re already familiar with this kind of AI: teaching machines to process a lot of information, run a series of algorithms, isolate patterns and find correlations in data far faster than any human could. Narrow AI can teach a computer to play chess, compile your listening preferences to make suggestions, or infer from your purchase history what you might be inclined to buy next. Even self-driving cars are at the Narrow AI level – using a wide range of input to follow the rules of the road.

2. General AI

General AI pushes intelligence farther: actual understanding and reason. This involves breaking beyond rules to think abstractly, create, and innovate – and then do it faster and better than a human being. So far, we haven’t been able to program a computer to invent something new. It’s a quantum leap from processing existing data, predicting outcomes based on past patterns…and coming up with a net new idea.

3. Super AI

At this level, AI becomes smarter than the very smartest humans – at which point we may finally find cures for every modern problem in society… or be exterminated as a race. No one can predict that yet.

How AI Helps Humans

With its ability to sift through huge amounts of minute details at breakneck speed, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to have a major impact on health – imagine better record keeping and linking information from disparate practitioners into one patient’s file, faster development of drugs, and mining data to determine therapeutic candidates more quickly and accurately.

Personally, I’ve benefited from the use of AI in fraud detection. Last Christmas, my credit card and my spouse’s credit card were being used at a liquor store somewhere in the US we’d never been. We were alerted and able to immediately halt the illegal use of our cards. I’m pretty thankful I didn’t have to rely on a human to watch every single credit card purchase in the world and identify this small purchase halfway across the continent as incongruent activity.

“Imagine a world where the role of the insurance company is less about paying claims after a loss has occurred but rather is about proactively preventing losses or at least limiting the size of losses…this would be using predictive powers of big data processed using machine learning and AI.” – Imagine 2025

Last week on I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? EP 17 we spoke with Chris Pierre about how Keynorth Group uses AI to process “mounds” of data to find patterns, a task that would be impossibly time-consuming for humans. This is exactly the rapid attention to details and patterns that makes fraud prediction and detection possible.

Next week on I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? EP 19, Erin Kelly, CEO of Advanced Symbolics Inc. will introduce us to Polly – a machine that has accurately predicted several political events.

Episode 20, November 13th, on I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? you’ll hear my interview with Anu Bidani, CEO of Stem Minds. Anu’s passion is teaching STEM gamification, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to prepare the next generation for the jobs that don’t even exist yet.

If you’re intrigued (or even spooked) by Artificial Intelligence and want to learn more, Erin Kelly is our special guest at the next LIVE Elevated Conversations dinner party. If you’ll be in the Ottawa area on November 21st, reach out to express your interest in attending to me at colleen.campbell@rbc.com. This event is by invite only, so please apply for your spot at the table through me.