Artificial Intelligence: Saint Or Sinner? Posted on : Dec 08 - 2018

Here's a question for the digital age: in a car crash involving an autonomous vehicle and a pedestrian, who dies? The pedestrian or the passengers?

Well, let's hope neither because I for one wouldn't wish to be faced with that conundrum but it needs answering before we witness widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.

Neither are we about to see our skies filled with drones, frantically crisscrossing the skies making deliveries up and down the country. Since July this year, in the U.K. it has been illegal to fly a drone above 120 meters, pilots require a license from the Civil Aviation Authority and there are strict guidelines for usage.

A little closer to home, although not life-threatening, many businesses are faced with the dilemma of whether to declare their call center chatbots as being just that or whether to let the caller make assumptions as to the provenance of the 'person' on the other end of the phone.

Online grocer Ocado plans to use digital assistants in the next 12 months but this will be to supplement call center chat, "Artificial Intelligence (AI) can't resolve complex issues, that needs human interaction" according to Head of Operations Ian Pattle when speaking at a recent event in London.

You might, therefore, be forgiven for thinking that the future's a bit bleak for AI, after all, we don't want artificial, we want artisan and authentic. Don't we?

Artificial Intelligence: Saint Or Sinner?

Assisted Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence - we all have our favorites and they don't usually include 'artificial'.

IBM is perhaps most well known for Watson and it was once put to me to think of Watson as like having 'hundreds of little Einstein's running around at your every beck and call'.

And whilst AI is becoming more and more ubiquitous - Spotify and Netflix being two examples of personalization being driven on virtually a one to one basis meanwhile Huawei claim that AI resides in my new P20 Pro smartphone to ensure crystal clear pictures even in very low light (it works) - I have a feeling that we are yet to experience the great AI epiphany. View More