AllAnalytics - James M. Connolly - AI: Doomed to Buzzword Status

For all of the good that machine learning and artificial intelligence promise, what happens if either machine learning or AI becomes the next hot marketing buzzword in tech and the business sector? Picture AI falling helplessly into the morass that sucked in "big data," "smart" anything, and "Internet of" you name it. That rumble that you would feel might be Alan Turing fidgeting in his grave. I can hear some marketing newbie now, "Well, our product is made of plastic. And, we think it's really intelligent. For more than 60 years hundreds of very bright and accomplished computer scientists, from Turing to today's doctoral students, have researched and debated what AI is, and what it isn't. At what point is a computer actually thinking? Then, we have machine learning as a subset of or precurser to AI. Feed a neural network with enough examples -- such as text and images -- and it advances to the point where it can translate English into another language, recognize faces of people, or identify the most successful treatments for diseases. I suppose AI is destined to be cast into Buzzword Hades once everyone from that marketing newbie to the CEO desperate for something innovative hear more about the real-world successes of AI and machine learning. Memos and meetings will be punctuated with shouts of, "We need to be doing that." We already are seeing examples of niche applications utilizing techniques such as image recognition in anti-terrorism initiatives and pattern recognition in cybersecurity. Applications in the commercial space seem to be ready to pop up in the public view. A Forbes article cites three industry sectors -- healthcare, finance, and insurance -- as prime candidates for AI and machine learning applications. The article notes, "Sequencing of individual genomes and then comparing them to a vast database will allow doctors -- and/or AI bots -- to predict the probability that you will contract a particular disease and the best ways to treat those diseases when they appear.