Artificial Intelligence is a topic which evokes mixed reactions among people. Some consider AI to be a technological revolution which will solve all our problems and transform our planet into a veritable paradise. Others equate AI with robots courtesy of Hollywood movies; not good robots but rather exceedingly intelligent but evil and villainous robots with nefarious plans to wipe out the entire human civilization. As a computer engineer, I have always had an insider view of the technologies and been witness to many technical changes over the decades. From BASIC, to C to C to Java – each iteration produced better and more sophisticated coding mechanisms.

In an economy where data is changing how companies create value -- and compete -- experts predict that using artificial intelligence (AI) at a larger scale will add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. As AI is changing how companies work, many believe that who does this work will change, too -- and that organizations will begin to replace human employees with intelligent machines. This is already happening: intelligent systems are displacing humans in manufacturing, service delivery, recruitment, and the financial industry, consequently moving human workers towards lower-paid jobs or making them unemployed. This trend has led some to conclude that in 2040 our workforce may be totally unrecognizable. Are humans and machine really in competition with each other though?

NEORIS, a tech consultancy that accelerates the digital capabilities of enterprises, today announced their global partnership with Neo4j, the leader in graph databases, to deliver unparalleled insights and capabilities to their clients around the world. The NEORIS Augmented Intelligence Platform now integrates Neo4j's leading graph database technology into its Knowledge Fabric Layer, enabling more intuitive data analysis and machine learning capabilities which are augmented by connected data for deeper insights, The platform serves as the key strategic enabler of NEORIS' recently launched Augmented Intelligence Practice by accelerating an enterprise's time to actionable insights. The Augmented Intelligence Platform is composed of four logical layers, namely Information Harvesting, Knowledge Fabric, Enterprise AI, and Human-centered Interfaces, for a complete framework that is poised to accelerate the deployment of next-generation, graph-powered AI digital solutions. "Artificial intelligence continues its push into areas such as smart supply-chains, advanced fraud management, risk management, regulatory compliance and delivering hyper-personalized products and services. The convergence of AI, graph technology and analytics provides an immense opportunity to develop learning applications grounded in the context of connected data, and thus capable of situational awareness. Aggregating large amounts of data across organizational silos, establishing intelligent relationships and connecting this knowledge with advanced AI models are redefining businesses," said Anthony DeLima, Global CTO and Head of NEORIS U.S. "We are excited about this partnership for many reasons, but most notably because it will enable us to work with our clients to deliver an entirely new generation of solutions that augment human thinking and decision-making."

Artificial intelligence is usually demonstrated by machines/devices that perceive their environment and undertake actions to maximize their chance of achieving their goals. Through A.I, machines tend to mimic the cognitive actions that are associated with humans. The recent capabilities of A.I. include; understanding human speech, interpreting data, being able to compete in the strategic game system, content delivery networks, and directing autonomous cars. All this has been accustomed to how everything is being digitalized. However, many specialists are championing against the over-development of artificial intelligence.

Ideally, an interface will surface the deepest principles underlying a subject, revealing a new world to the user. When you learn such an interface, you internalize those principles, giving you more powerful ways of reasoning about that world. Those principles are the diffs in your understanding. They're all you really want to see, everything else is at best support, at worst unimportant dross. The purpose of the best interfaces isn't to be user-friendly in some shallow sense.

We are in the early days of a promising new technology, and of the new era to which it is giving birth. This technology is as radically different from the programmable systems that have been produced by the IT industry for half a century as those systems were from the tabulators that preceded them. Commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, this new generation of technology and the cognitive systems it helps power will soon touch every facet of work and life – with the potential to radically transform them for the better. This is because these systems can ingest and understand all forms of data, which is being produced at an unprecedented rate. Cognitive systems like IBM's Watson can reason over this data, forming hypotheses and judgments.

Artificial intelligence will not replace human jobs but will instead help to augment human intelligence, it has been claimed. Speaking at HPE Discover in Las Vegas, executive VP and GM of HPE Software, Robert Youngjohns, called the idea of AI and machine learning replacing humans "fanciful". "Everything and everyone is producing data, whether it's enterprise apps, mobile phones, wearable devices, thermostats, sensors, log files, and more and more," said Youngjohns. "Machine learning does is employ advanced techniques - statistical inference, pattern recognition, artificial neural networks - to understand information in context and reveal hidden insights and predict outcomes" "We need a pragmatic way to get and harness this, to augment human intelligence of our people and our organisation. Sometimes there's this fanciful view of machine learning and artificial intelligence will be replacing the intelligent [people] is a little far fetched. This is about augmenting human intelligence, making our people more insightful, more effective and more responsive so we can collectively deliver superior business outcomes," he added.