What's missing is the eyebrows: marketers need AI for heavy lifting, not emotion

When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid." These were the words uttered by Garry Kasparov, then the world's best chess player as he lost to a computer, IBM's Deep Blue, in 1997. The dominance of intelligent machines over humans is a concept that has haunted the human psyche since the early ages of mechanisation and resulted in some of the world's best fiction. As the availability of cheap computing power grows exponentially and algorithms grow ever more able to anticipate and respond to human behaviour, artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly moving from the realms of science fiction to everyday reality. Not only do computers routinely beat the world's best human chess players, voice-powered personal assistants help us through our social lives and self-driving cars have already clocked up millions of miles around the world's busiest cities. As in previous eras of technological advance, the rise of AI today is accompanied by fears that the machines will take ...