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D O Y O U K N O W W H AT I T I S ?
DON’T FEEL INADEQUATE IF YOU’RE NOT UP ON YOUR AI If you’re not talking about artificial intelligence, blockchain and kubernetes you’re just not keeping up, or at least that’s what many commentators would like you to think. But let’s have a bit of a reality check; What is AI? How will it affect you and your ERP platform and should you really be worried about it? For the purposes of this editorial I will reference three stages of AI. The early iteration of narrow AI, the current emerging AI and the prospect of AI which will change the world as we know it. The continuous development of AI will be the most disruptive invention ever. More revolutionary than the discovery of fire, more disruptive than the agricultural and industrial revolutions and more pervasive than the internet and social media. AI will solve the world’s hardest problems and, when fully mature AGI (artificial general intelligence) is developed, it will be the last thing humanity ever invents. AGI may be some way off – perhaps ten, twenty or thirty years, we just don’t know. But once we are able to create a general intelligence algorithm it will set the agenda, make the breakthroughs and determine the future.
WE’VE BEEN USING AI FOR 50 YEARS AI is not a new technology; we have all been using AI for decades. Every time you create a query in Excel. Every time you type something into Google. Every time you use your SatNav. There are literally millions of real-world applications most of us take for granted, that were once considered ground breaking and powered by AI. Many emerging technologies were called AI in the development stage and once they have been built and deployed it’s just called 52
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The continuous development of AI will be the most disruptive invention ever
Historically emerging technologies were called AI in the development stage and once they have been built and deployed it’s just called software
Applications that were once called AI look like a very pale comparison to the emerging deep learning algorithms being used today
software. Since the 1950s, programmers have been hand-crafting expert systems to make our lives easier or to challenge us in game play. In its simplest terms, a pocket calculator uses AI - it is an expert system that is very good at maths. The vast majority of historical AI applications follow the same logic. They are all expert systems, loaded with knowledge tokens to perform a very narrow task quicker and more accurately than a human can. Whilst these systems have developed significantly and can now perform very complex tasks, you only got out what you put in - at some point, the knowledge was programmed by a human. The advantage was that AI could access the knowledge and deploy it quicker than we could. So why is there so much hype around AI now when we have been using it for the last fifty years? To understand this, you first need to appreciate that AI has recently evolved from the type of narrow expert systems I described above to more autonomous deep learning applications that perform tasks which we could only have dreamed of a few years ago. In the strictest sense of the word, the original flavour of AI wasn’t that intelligent because its capacity to learn was zero. That has changed and the type of applications that were once called AI look like a very pale comparison to the emerging ML-based algorithms being used today. There are two key drivers behind these recent advancements; firstly, hardware has improved immeasurably and the exponential developments in processing power, memory and storage have accounted for roughly half of the overall growth in application power. Secondly, we are getting better at developing algorithms and coding AI. Many current applications go far beyond the historically narrow expert systems of years gone by and can now ‘learn on the job’ and improve themselves without further coding from a human.
WHAT IS AGI AND SUPERINTELLIGENCE? The holy grail for AI developers is AGI and superintelligence. AGI is a term coined to de-
