Artificial Intelligence- Beauty or Beast?

Artificial Intelligence is in the news everyday now. It was a major source of conflict in the recent actor’s strike. But Artificial Intelligence is not new. Artificial Intelligence has been around since the fifties. It is a branch of Computer Science dedicated to creating intelligent machines that work and react like humans. It involves using computers to do things that usually require human intelligence.

I majored in Computer Science in college in the 70’s and yes, we studied Artificial Intelligence back then. In fact, I was in the first Computer Science graduating class at Brandeis University. Today, Computer Science is one of the most popular majors at Brandeis. Back then, there were a handful of us that literally spent every waking hour in or around the computer center trying to learn everything we could about this emerging field. Now, we are referred to as the pioneers but we didn’t think of ourselves that way then.

I recently took Kartik Hosanagar’s class at the Wharton School on Artificial Intelligence for Business and I highly recommend his book “A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence.” https://a.co/d/4d6YiG4

What is new is the rate that Artificial Intelligence has exploded recently. The emergence of LLM’s or Large Language Models that can respond to queries in natural language instead of a programming language coupled with increases in computing power are the main factors driving this growth.

AI is all around us and sometimes we don’t even know it. If you talk to Siri or Alexa, you are using AI. If you take a recommendation from a shopping site, you are using AI.  When your music streaming service suggests tunes for you to listen to, that’s AI too.

In most applications, it has been found that AI plus human is better than AI or human alone. So the best applications will be those where the AI assists the human to do tasks better or faster. Do I think AI is going to take over our jobs? No. But do I think AI will improve productivity and change the nature of our jobs today? Absolutely. Do I think there are regulatory, legal and ethical issues that management teams need to consider in the implementation of an AI system? Yes and the technology may be ahead of a board’s willingness to take legal and ethical risks with AI.

AI is breaking into new areas.  Deloitte has compiled an exhaustive list of applications that may affect your industry. It’s worth taking a look at. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/articles/ai-dossier.html