The rise of AI and robotics and what it means for MSMEs

By Manish Upadhyay The debate around Artificial intelligence (popularly called AI) has begun with extreme and not so extreme views about how it will impact jobs and particularly jobs in the MSME sector. The fact of the matter is that technology is ubiquitous, kind of a hygiene in every sector and every job, it's just that with the rise of computing power, server capacity and massive connectivity, the AI promise has become more certain and can't be ignored any further. So what is AI, as the name suggests intelligence as manifested by machines, which tends to mimic human intelligence in some form. Most importantly an AI system needs to be evaluated from what goal it wants to accomplish, largely it can be divided into three groups. Strong AI: which is focussed on actually simulating human reasoning, focussed not only to build systems that think but also to explain how humans think, 2. Weak AI: which is focused on building systems that can behave like humans, but the results will tell nothing about how humans think - IBM Deep Blue Chess programme is one such example.