Machine Learning Isn't Mechanical - Northern Light - Machine learning powered knowledge management

"Can't we just buy one of those AI programs and turn it loose? It's so smart, won't it just figure things out?" This was the giddily optimistic ― but wholly naïve -- question posed recently by one of my clients, an otherwise savvy corporate executive of great experience and intelligence. The question vividly illustrates a disturbing reality: Although 85 percent of CEOs believe artificial intelligence will change the way they do business in the next five years (according to a recent survey conducted at the World Economic Forum in Davos), there's still a whole lot of misinformation out there about what machine intelligence can and cannot do. I blame a lot of these techno-myths on the depiction of "intelligent" computers in popular culture. From HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey to the scheming videogame avatars in Disney's 1982 Tron to the rebellious android "hosts" in HBO's Westworld, AI in sci-fi is depicted as having the personality traits, emotions, self-awareness, and agency of flesh-and-blood human beings.