Artificial Intelligence: Delivering But Not Yet Arrived

March 22, 2020

Artificial intelligence is the basis for most technology currently in development, because it is capable of handling complex actions and is designed to learn. AI is the most advanced algorithms invented to this day, but what does that mean in reference to business and industry? Forbes published the, “Levels And Limits Of AI” to provide perspective on AI’s capabilities, while Andreessen Horowitz takes a similar yet differing approach in, “The New Business Of AI (And How It’s Different From Traditional Software).”

One thing both articles agree on is that AI is here to stay until something more advanced is designed. Andreessen Horowitz agrees humans will be involved with AI beyond creating the algorithms, but there is more required to get AI working correctly for a company. AI, according to Forbes, is designed to do three things:

“There are several “levels” of artificial intelligence. A few years ago my friends John Frank and Jason Briggs, who run Diffeo, suggested breaking artificial intelligence into 3 levels of service: Acceleration, Augmentation, and Automation. Acceleration is taking an existing human process and helping humans do it faster. For example, the current versions of textual auto-complete that Google offers are acceleration AI. They offer a completed version of what the user might already say. The next level, augmentation, takes what a human is doing and augments it. In addition to speeding up what the human is doing (like acceleration), it makes the human’s product better. An example of this is what Grammarly does with improving the grammar of text. The final level is automation. In the previous two levels there are still “humans in the loop.” Automation achieves a task with no human in the loop. The aspiration here is Level 5 autonomous driving like Aurora and Waymo are pursuing.”

Andreessen Horowitz breaks down the obstacles businesses will encounter with AI deployment. In short, there will be some, most of which are SOP when implementing any new technology. The only difference is that AI is smarter, but there is this consolation for humans:

“The need for human intervention will likely decline as the performance of AI models improves. It’s unlikely, though, that humans will be cut out of the loop entirely. Many problems – like self-driving cars – are too complex to be fully automated with current-generation AI techniques. Issues of safety, fairness, and trust also demand meaningful human oversight – a fact likely to be enshrined in AI regulations currently under development in the US, EU, and elsewhere.”

AI is a tool meant to simplify and advance society, essentially it is not meant to replace humanity. Common sense weighs in on deploying AI-based technology. The ROI is a big factor, but also consider the phrase, “if it is not broken, do not fix it.”

Whitney Grace, March 22, 2020

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