AI: no more silk purses from sow's ears?

Artificial intelligence in the professions seems here to stay but Sue Bramall asks: is it anything but artificial? In a technology round table report published recently by one of the leading legal magazines, one of the panel of four declared that artificial intelligence (AI) "is unlikely to take center stage just yet, and certainly not in the short-to-medium term" with two other participants concurring. I suspect this quote may come back to haunt him, as the fourth member of the panel had already seen the future and quoted the developments in AI which had already taken place in 2015 between BLP and RAVN, between Pinsent Masons and Cerico, and between Dentons with IBM Watson. The theme of'artificial intelligence' is one of the hot conference topics for 2016 – so much sexier than'big data'. However, such intelligence is anything but artificial.