The year 2017 arrives and we humans are still in charge. The machines haven't taken over yet, but they are gaining on us. Google's DeepMind AlphaGo computer program recently beat the world champ at Go, a complex board game, while Japanese researchers plan to build the world's fastest supercomputer for use on artificial intelligence projects. It will do 130 quadrillion calculations per second, which is, um, really, really fast. She can explain it better than we can.

Today our focus has been on KPIs, ERP, WMS, TMS, YMS, EDI, The Cloud, S and OP, 3 D Printing, IoT, IoE, Drones: Same Hour/Day/Time Delivery to Customers, Cyber Security, Theft, Government Regulations, E-Commerce, Omni-Channel, Modeling/Simulation, Risk Management, Tracking, Traceability, Re-shoring, Robotics, et al, but…what about Artificial Intelligence or AI technologies? AI is a controversy of deep, lasting dimensions. Will machines learn to think like humans…and then outthink us? If AI Technologies Can Think & Act Like "Us" Where do "We" Go? The application of AI technologies has created the ability to understand, store and use product information in an entirely new way.

Today our focus has been on KPIs, ERP, WMS, TMS, YMS, EDI, The Cloud, S and OP, 3 D Printing, IoT, IoE, Drones: Same Hour/Day/Time Delivery to Customers, Cyber Security, Theft, Government Regulations, E-Commerce, Omni-Channel, Modeling/Simulation, Risk Management, Tracking, Traceability, Re-shoring, Robotics, et al, but…what about Artificial Intelligence or AI technologies? AI is a controversy of deep, lasting dimensions. Will machines learn to think like humans…and then outthink us? The application of AI technologies has created the ability to understand, store and use product information in an entirely new way. AI technologies allow you to understand the underlying grammatical structure, the product DNA, used to build each product, together with all natural variations that potentially exist.

The relationship between the human mind and body is something that has occupied philosophers at least since the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, bequeathed his notorious "dualism" to his successors. For Descartes the mind was a different "substance" compared to the body – the former was a "thinking substance" and the latter an "extended substance", and he resolved the problem of the manner in which these mutually exclusive substances "interacted" by postulating the so-called "animal spirits" – a hybrid concept, denoting something between mind and body – as mediating between them in the pineal gland at the base of the human brain. Increasingly, from the late 19th-century onwards, thinkers started questioning the validity of such dualistic thinking; in various ways philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that humans cannot be broken down into mutually exclusive parts, but that they comprised beings characterised by a unity-in-totality. Through many phenomenological analyses Merleau-Ponty, for example, demonstrated that, although – in the event of an injury to your leg, for example – one is able to distance oneself from your body, as if it is something alien to yourself, referring to "the pain in your leg", and so on, it is undeniable that, at a different level of awareness, "you" are in pain, and not just your leg. In short: we don't just have bodies; we "ARE our bodies". This line of thinking, which has far-reaching implications for current thinking about the differences – or the presumed similarities – between humans and artificial intelligence (AI), has been resurrected, perhaps surprisingly, by one of the most brilliant computer-scientists in the world, namely David Gelernter of Yale University in the United States – the subject of a recent article by David Von Drehle (Encounters with the Archgenius; TIME, March 7, 2016, pp.

He may not be as smart as Watson or Lieutenant Commander Data. He's definitely not as strong as the new FANUC M-2000iA/1700L that can lift 1.7 tons -- the equivalent of two small cars or 24 people. And he is certainly not as pretty as the robot "clones" on Orphan Black. Little did I know though that my favorite robot would be the precursor of the current AI robotic automation wave. The 60s TV series Lost in Space featured a cast member that aided and protected teenager Will Robinson and his family on their comical misadventures in space.

When the computer AlphaGo (0) defeated Lee Sedol -- who is perhaps the world's top Go player -- by a match score of 4-1 last week, Google's DeepMind division showed that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to deliver on some of its promises. Go is an Asian board game far more complex than chess, and it has been viewed as the last great game challenge for AI. When DeepMind set out to conquer Go, some people thought the project would take 10 years. In fact, it only took the team about one year. Unlike chess, in which most of the great games and moves in history can be programmed into a database and searched during the match, Go has too many combinations to work that way.

A "rock star" (New York Times) of the computing world provides a radical new work on the meaning of human consciousness. The holy grail of psychologists and scientists for nearly a century has been to understand and replicate both human thought and the human mind. In fact, it's what attracted the now-legendary computer scientist and AI authority David Gelernter to the discipline in the first place. As a student and young researcher in the 1980s, Gelernter hoped to build a program with a dial marked "focus." At maximum "focus," the program would "think" rationally, formally, reasonably.

An opposing school of thought, sometimes called "neural cy or "self-organizing systems,".

In particular the technique of heuristic programming is under detailed investigation as a means to the end of applying largescale rently digital computers to the solution of a difficult class of problems cur considered to be beyond their capabilities; namely those problems that seem to require the agent of human intelligence and ingenuity for their solution. It is difficult to characterize such problems further, except, perhaps, plex to remark rather vaguely that they generally involve com vironment.