In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer onboard starship “Heart of Gold” could be described as intelligent (if “intelligent” is a synonym for “snarky”).
In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer onboard starship “Heart of Gold” could be described as intelligent (if “intelligent” is a synonym for “snarky”).
One of the biggest mistakes business leaders make is assuming what brought them success in the past (business models, core competencies, business processes, and tools) will continue to do so indefinitely.
If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the world around you, you’ve probably noticed quite a bit of discussion, speculation, and hand-wringing about emerging technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Much of what’s been written in the popular press and on social media centers around big, scary questions, such as:
In his 1991 song “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis sang that his kind of people were not those who “pay their bills on home computers.” At that time—before the World Wide Web—paying bills on home computers was revolutionary, available only on online services such as AOL and CompuServe.
Computer scientists, by and large, are not considered particularly artistic. When you spend your time in the world of bits and bytes, algorithms and loops, and nodes and edges, you may not think much about aesthetics. To the extent that you do, you might think, “How can I get a computer to create an image or a song or a poem by itself?”
For much of its history, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies of all kinds have been relegated to computer science laboratories and arcane academic papers. As discussed many times in this space, only recently has the technology, specifically machine learning techniques, advanced to a state where developers at large can experiment with it without requiring a PhD in computer science.
