2018’s 5th biggest barrier to digital transformation within global companies was “immature digital culture.” What is your level of understanding of one of its major components, artificial intelligence, in regards to its issues and opportunities?

Do you think 2018 was the year of artificial intelligence, or do you think 2019 will be its year? Perhaps we are now in the middle of the AI era.

For several years now, research, development, and business investments in AI technologies have no longer been the preserve of Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple (GAFA) or their rivals from China Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, or Xiaomi (BATX). Look at an example: “The essential landscape of enterprise AI companies (2018-2019).” You will find a plethora of companies that make the best use of artificial intelligence around areas including Business Intelligence, Productivity, Customer, Management, HR and Talent, B2B Sales and Marketing, Consumer Marketing, Digital Commerce, Data Science, Engineering and IT, Security and Risk, Industrials and Manufacturing, Logistics and Supply Chain, and Legal and Compliance.

Also, look at the news. It is clear that every week brings articles or press releases of new technology, new methodology, new systems, or new innovations that claim to hold the latest and most advanced results in the implementation of artificial intelligence. Amazingly, often times, they are even legitimate.

However, with the growth of these technological advances and their high potential for success, some nations' administrations or private companies might let themselves be drawn in by an abusive use of these capabilities, while others are getting lost in vain attempts to understand it, to apply it to their context, or to regulate it.

In the midst of all this, with the cacophony of the whole ecosystem, and with the dissonance between the informed advice from leading personalities from the worlds of science, industry, and government, it is difficult to get an overall picture and to carry out a thorough evaluation to make one’s own opinion.

All Business Sectors Are Affected

Predictive analysis, business automation, natural language processing, voice recognition, the ability to speak, machine vision, autonomous learning, neural networks, interactions with humans, empowering robot capabilities, highly complex calculations, or algorithms processing: all of this might be applied to a full spectrum of various industries. In addition to the areas above, here are some practical implementations of AI in use case perspectives:

• Security: Helping to defend against cyber attacks
• Self-driving cars and Robots: Identifying AI "blind spots"
• Health: Detecting a multitude of deadliest cancers
• Border Control: Questioning travelers via AI lie detector (source)
• Retail: Using Big Data and AI to Predict Consumer Behavior

Whatever the sector concerned, AI is expected to increase efficiency, enhance productivity, increase automation, and enhance customer experience. On top of this, the ultimate goal is (should be?) to make humanity progress with respect for the human being and ethics. This ethics concern is far from being mundane. This will be included in an upcoming dedicated article.

In order to put together an overall picture of AI from a different angle, I intend to propose some quotes I’ve selected, and their job is to provoke curiosity and reflection rather than find solutions.

Artificial Intelligence Perspectives in 12 Quotes

1. “I believe that at the end of the century, the use of words and general educated opinions will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” ― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence
2. “By far the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” ― Eliezer Yudkowsky
3. “As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.” ― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management
4. “Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress” ― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It
5. “On the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, …/... [accidentally] creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. ” ― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind
6. “Why command a robot not to do harm — wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place?” ― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
7. "Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence." — Ginni Rometty
8. “The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. .../… You have no idea how fast it is growing; at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe. 10 years at most.” — Elon Musk
9. “Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.” — Alan Kay
10. “Today's AI is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people to knowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people” — Patrick Winston, MIT AI Lab briefing, 1997
11. “When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.” — Jaron Lanier
12. “If artificial intelligence really has little to do with computer technology and much more to do with abstract principles of mental organization, then the distinctions among AI, psychology, and even philosophy of mind seem to melt away.” — John C. Haugeland

What’s Next?

At the risk of falling into the trap of the “inception syndrome,” there is reason to wager that sooner than we could have imagined, further AI innovations will come from artificial intelligence.

But innovating is not enough. What about progressing? It’s not worth innovating if it’s not for the sake of human progress. This is why, despite what alarmists or pessimists might predict, the point is not to worry about AI taking our jobs but more how AI can augment humans, how the combination of human and advanced technologies can make a better world.

I'd like to finish with a final quote. In an interview that happened in June 2017, Jack Ma (马云), the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, predicted that humans will win against machines, stating:

“Machines are good at knowledge while human beings are good at wisdom.”

It sounds to me like the perfect balance.