The AI Wave

Orban was a Hungarian engineer who specialized in building massive cannons in the 15th century. In 1492, he offered his services to the Byzantine Emperor , but they couldn't afford his fee. Luckily for him, the Turks who were besieging Constantinople at the time were more than happy to oblige. As a result, Constantinople is now known as Istanbul.

Of course, superior technology wasn't the only reason the Turks defeated the Byzantines, but it was a decisive advantage. In fact, if one side of a conflict has a significant technological superiority, it's often enough to decide the battle before it even begins.

The same is true in economic competitions. Countries and companies that deploy superior technology have an almost insurmountable edge over those that don’t.

This isn't news to anyone who's lived over the past 30 years. Computers and later the Internet have transformed every aspect of our work and lives.

We ridicule companies that didn't adopt digital technologies fast enough, and the only people with anti-technology sentiments are off-the-grid hipsters, and only then most for just a few days of the year.

Yet somehow, we as a society have begun to fear the next logical phase of connected computing: Artificial Intelligence.

Here's the thing: The main problem is the name. AI has come to mean human-level consciousness in pop culture: Robots that think and feel as we do. Yes, that's pretty creepy, and leads to the obvious worry: What happens when they rebel against us?

This is an unfortunate misconception. The truth is that, even with extreme optimism, we are nowhere close. There isn't even a well accepted theory of how the human mind works, let alone a blueprint for replicating one. Think about it this way: It takes a minimum of 20 years to fully educate an intelligent human being (most people would say more like 30 years). Even if we had a human-equivalent artificial brain tomorrow, it's reasonable that it would take decades for it to match the average 20 year old.

Now, it actually doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with this. No one truly knows, but what we know for sure is that computers ARE becoming more “intelligent” in the sense that they can be used to improve decision making in specific contexts.

It's far more accurate to call Artificial Intelligence “Statistical Inferencing” (Machine Learning is the actual name the pros use). That's a more descriptive term for the current state of the art today.

What AI will mean for sure is that people who can effectively improve their performance using AI will out-compete those who don’t.

Just like every piece of technology that has come before, AI is just another tool to be used by humans.

Related: Tech, Society.