Artificial Intelligence. Smarter Than A Chicken.

I was recently at a garden centre looking at chickens. Yes, garden centres now sell chickens and chicken houses, so that you can have your very own chicken and eggs in your yard, and then the netting so that the foxes don’t get at the chickens and so on. A bit like the mob, helping you solve problems that you didn’t know you had.

Anyway. There was a plaque on the chicken cage saying that the chicken is the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus Rex and I looked at it and there was some momentary resemblance.

Of course, we have an innate respect for Tyrannosaurus Rex, mainly because of “Jurassic Park”. However, there is a negative quality to T-Rex that chickens have also inherited, which is the size of its brain.

But think of this. For literally millions of years the dinosaurs were the most intelligent things out there. If you consider the vastness of universe and the barren rocks of hundreds of lifeless planets, then “chicken-dinosaurs” seem pretty amazing. That’s why I find the conversation around Artificial Intelligence and how it is “not quite there” slightly absurd. Ok, it might not pass the Turing test and be able to fool everyone into thinking that it is a live human. But it doesn’t have to be human to be amazing, and it certainly doesn’t need to pass as one to be useful.

I recently came across a sponsored link by UBS that invited me to chat to Rosa, one of the more advanced chat bots. I cannot say that the conversation was very life-like but you know what, it certainly beat typing questions and key words into my browser.

The time when we will be able to use AI as an assistant while doing research and working with databases is very close. I am not alone in thinking that. According to the International Edition of the New York Times, “Oracle has already anonymized data from 1500 companies, including three billion consumers and 400 million business profiles, representing $3 trillion in consumer purchases”. Soon there will be applications that will draw on this knowledge.

The usefulness of AI, when trawling through data is that it allows for tangential thinking and can make decisions, rather than wait on you to hypothesize with a myriad of factors until you will get something resembling an acceptable result. With the near infinite scalability offered by cloud computing this can be a powerful proposition. That’s on the high end.

If I think back to my university experiences, I have benefited enormously from the digitalization of archives and computerization of libraries. A key word search through a document database was a key factor in finding good quotable sources for my essays. Now, if I had AI assistance plugged in into the digitalized archives, bouncing of me and searching what I needed, well I would dig through archives much faster.

The commercialisation of AI is already taking place. A brief search tells me that today around fifty companies in the UK claim that they are utilizing AI in their software and IT products.

The time is very near when the AI that inhabits our various technology applications will stop being a fun gimmick to play around with, and will turn into a mainstream feature, and a significant earner for the people that create it.

#OpinionPiece