No matter what your opinion might be of the pandemic or our collective response to it, one thing is clear: 2020 showed the business world how important it is to have a robust, agile digital transformation strategy. Companies with the flexibility to pivot – sometimes multiple times – with employees, customers, and production did better in 2020 than those with rigid systems and infrastructure.
The future ain’t what it used to be. -Tom Petty, Spike
Consider two speculative sci-fi films, Blade Runner (1982) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Blade Runner was set in 2019 and 2001: A Space Odyssey was…2001. In both films, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role, and not in a good way.
The Star Wars canon has medical droids playing a prominent role in autonomous diagnosis and treatment of injuries and illnesses. How cool would it be if even semi-autonomous systems could handle routine diagnoses and treatments, freeing doctors and caregivers to focus on more challenging cases? Well that future is a little closer to reality than some may think!
Humankind, it seems, has for a long time been fascinated with the idea of machines that can mimic the human capabilities of thought, intuition, creativity, problem-solving, and communication. From the chess-playing Mechanical Turk of the 18th century (which was actually a clever and elaborate ruse) through the ELIZA computerized “psychotherapist” in the 1960s and any number of sci-fi franchises and Saturday-morning cartoons, history has no shortage of intelligent machines, real or imagined.
Humans have a curious habit of talking to inanimate objects. As children, we talk to stuffed animals and other toys. (Sometimes, we answer for them.) This carries into adulthood; we talk to plants, cars, televisions, kitchen appliances, computers, rocks... Sometimes we chastise them when they misbehave.
If someone asked you to list the top 10 technologically cutting-edge, forward-thinking industries aggressively adopting digital transformation, chances are “insurance” would not be among them.
