Artificial Intelligence Needs To Reset Posted on : Oct 12 - 2018

I had the chance to interview my colleague at ArCompany, Karen Bennet, a seasoned engineering executive in platform technology, open and closed source systems and artificial intelligence technology. A former engineering lead from Yahoo!, and part of the original team who brought Red Hat to success, Karen evolved with the technological revolution, utilizing AI in expert systems in her early IBM days, and is currently laying witness to the rapid experimentation in machine learning and deep learning. Our discussions about the current state of AI have culminated into this article.

It’s difficult to navigate AI amidst all the hype. The promises of AI, for the most part, have not come to fruition. AI is still emerging and has not become the pervasive force that has been promised. Consider the compelling stats that validate excitement in the AI hype:

• 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000
• Investment into AI start-ups by VCs has increased 6X since 2000
• The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013

As of 2017, Statista put out these findings:

As of last year, only 5% of businesses worldwide have incorporated AI extensively into their processes and offerings, 32% have not yet adopted, and 22% do not have plans to.

Filip Pieniewski confirmed in his recent post on Venturebeat: “The AI winter is well on its way”:

We are now in the middle of 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet — the NIPS conference is still oversold, corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk still keeps promising self-driving cars, and Google keeps pushing Andrew Ng’s line that AI is bigger than electricity. But this narrative is beginning to crack.

We touted the claims of the autonomous driving car. Earlier this spring the death of a pedestrian to a self-driving vehicle raised alarms that went beyond the technology and called to question the ethics or lack thereof behind the decisions of an automated system. The trolley problem is not a simple binary choice between the life of one person to save 5 people but rather evolves into a debate of conscience, emotion and perception that now complicates the path to which a reasonable decision can be made by a machine. The conclusion from this article states:

But the dream of a fully autonomous car may be further than we realize. There’s growing concern among AI experts that it may be years, if not decades, before self-driving systems can reliably avoid accidents.

To use history as a predictor, both cloud and the dot net industries took about 5 years before they started impacting people in a significant way, and almost 10 years before these industries influenced major shifts in the market. We are envisioning a similar timeline for Artificial Intelligence. As Karen explains,

To enable adoption by everyone, a product needs to be in place, one that is scalable and one that can be used by everyone–not just data scientists. This product will need to take into account the data lifecycle of capturing data, preparing it, training models and predicting. With data being stored in the cloud, data pipelines can continuously extract and prepare them to train the models which will make the predictions. The models need to continuously improve from new training data, which, in turn, will keep the models relevant and transparent. That is the objective and the promise. View More