AI is the New Black

On February 9, 2017, two technology market leaders made announcements: SAP unveiled its next-generation intelligent ERP system, and Nvidia announced that demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications was driving demand for its graphics platform. On the face of it, these announcements were business as usual – routine sound bites that proliferate in the tech news landscape. Look a bit deeper, though, and you realize that this day marked a profound shift in both the way businesses use technology and the implications for the rest of us. For decades, developing a computer that could think has been the Holy Grail of technology. And while we have made tremendous progress in our ability to process vast amount of data, the "thinking" part has remained mostly elusive. We are still stuck between two diametrically opposed visions of AI – on one side, it's the smart but deeply dystopian world of HAL ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and on the other, it's a simpler world of devices like Alexa or Siri playing songs or ordering items for us.