What is Artificial Intelligence?

There is too much buzz in the media and we talk indistinctly about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Artificial Intelligence is the technology designed to make computers learn, think, create new knowledge just like human beings or even better.

In this and other articles we will try to talk about the state of the art in artificial intelligence, what is possible and what is not, to focus on real science and not science fiction.

We can talk about two types of artificial intelligence: strong and weak.

Strong artificial intelligence: This refers to intelligence capable of coping with tasks in a similar way to humans or even better. Concepts such as consciousness, sensitivity, creation of new knowledge from existing knowledge come into play here. In 2020 this falls into the realm of science fiction and only certain Deep Learning techniques such as generative networks allow ” to simulate” the creation of new content from existing knowledge.

Weak artificial intelligence: Artificial intelligence focused on solving a specific task, here machine learning comes into play as a tool to accomplish it. In this group we can find the prediction of smartphone text, facial recognition that allows us to unlock a phone or the recommendation engines of either content or products in an e-commerce.

How is Artificial Intelligence (weak) impacting or will impact our lives?

We can observe two groups of critics of this technology, on one hand there are the catastrophists, very influenced by science fiction, talk about the ” menace of the machines ” as if they were going to become aware of their own existence without being able to assess the real state of maturity of the technology.

On the other hand, we have the neo-Luddites who will always be against the automation of work despite the fact that non-automation is a clear loss of productivity for society and a hindrance for prosperity. This group is a more serious threat to improved efficiency since they have more significant social backing.

They argue that artificial intelligence is destroying and will destroy jobs, what they do not want to admit is that with every technological wave there is both job destruction and job creation. They consider humans to be almost helpless and unable to adapt to change, to learn new professions like those that will emerge.

I would like to comment on an example of the impact of technological change in the past to suggest some of the possible new jobs that will be created by artificial intelligence.

In the early 19th century in the USA, an ingenious way was found to bring ice to southern areas and even to Central America. The route of ships carrying goods from the South to New England was used for logistical purposes and instead of sailing empty, ice was extracted from frozen lakes and transported in insulated containers on the ships. This provided access to a very rudimentary food preservation technology.

Years later, with the introduction of the first mechanical refrigerators, this ice transport industry was destroyed. However, a new one appeared with entirely new jobs: factory workers who built the refrigerators, dealers who sold them, and maintenance personnel who repaired them.

The transformation being brought on by Artificial Intelligence (weak) will happen in the same way. It will destroy non-value-added jobs, where humans cannot compete with machines in repetitive tasks, and create new ones focused on higher value.

For the deployment of technology to be effective, change management will be essential.  People are reluctant to change, and it will be difficult to leave their repetitive jobs to learn new skills, become more productive and thus be better rewarded. 

There are various forecasts, Gartner for example states that AI will create 2.3 million jobs worldwide by 2020 for every 1.8 million jobs destroyed.

Today, all banking institutions are pressuring their contractors who perform outsourced administrative tasks, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) to adopt process automation solutions, whether or not they include artificial intelligence.  It will only make sense to retain people to solve complex incidents that are outside the casuistry defined in the process.

Google provides conversational solutions with synthesized voice with a very natural sound in the automation of Call Centers. Through the use of NLP (natural language processing) they will communicate with the user in a very basic way but carrying out 80% of the functions of a human, delegating complex cases to human operators as we have mentioned before.

These are just two examples of the enormous transformation we are about to experience. From RADARION, as the first project within our MONOCLE laboratory, we are committed to artificial intelligence applied to competitive intelligence.

In future articles we will continue to address the topic of artificial intelligence applied, among other fields, to the processing of unstructured information such as text analysis, which we carry out at RADARION.