In conversation yesterday I realised that I've developed an occasional habit of defining alternatives to the Turing Test as ways of understanding quite how far away Artificial Intelligence really is. Here's the compilation... https://twitter.com/ballantine70/status/542986402800365568 An observation that humans are getting quite good at being able to parse complete gibberish that is the result of "AI" autocorrect … Continue reading New Turing Tests
Category: Technology
Computers are very good at following rules. It's kind of what they do. If you look at the recent landmark advances in machine intelligence, they are generally in one of two camps: using artificial intelligence to excel in a rules-boundaried domain (playing Chess, Go, Jeopardy, Poker, the markets and so on), or alternatively to use masses … Continue reading Following rules
Let me paint you a picture. In sound. The metaphors that we have to describe how the future might be are incredibly biased towards things visual. We talk about "visions", not "hearings". We are, if you listen to the neuro-linguistic geeks, incredibly visual in our preferences for how we receive information. A picture paints a … Continue reading Audiomented reality
And so the insurrection is beginning. Last week Japanese insurance Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance announced that it was going to be replacing 34 staff with an artificial intelligence that would be calculating payouts (although, it noted, with human oversight still making final approvals). The technology would improve productivity by 30% and the firm expected to save some … Continue reading The rise of the cost-benefit robots
Work in IT leadership? Want a stretch target for 2017 and beyond into the mythical lands of your "2020 Vision"? why not try #noPC. I spend quite a proportion of my working life talking with people at various levels of management in the world of Information Technology. Many (if not the majority) are very enlightened. … Continue reading #noPC
Another year flies past... If you go into a branch of McDonald's these days (an occasional guilty pleasure, I'll admit it), then you are increasingly likely to find that the restaurant has been upgraded to the new automated model. Big touch screens enable customers to place their orders, pay, and then queue up to receive … Continue reading Yearnote 2016
In January I'm going to be part of a stellar line up of speakers at The Focus Group's Customer Experience Digital Leadership event taking place in London. I'll be exploring some of the themes on Play that are developing out of my work on the book (see the clip below), but I can also highly recommend … Continue reading Digital Customer Experience event
Piece of data #1: the average car is parked for an average of 95% of its lifetime. Piece of data #2: 57.5% of the UK population drive to work. Piece of data #3: the average Brit sleeps something of the order of 7 hours in any 24 hour period. Including time either end for going to bed and … Continue reading Self-driving fantasies
There should be a word to describe words that sound like they should be onomatopoeic but aren't. Top of my list of these nonomatopoeic words would be Fungible. It sounds like an adjective that could be applied to describe the properties of the caulk materials that builders use to fill in gaps around woodwork. "Ooh, … Continue reading Fungible
I was pointed yesterday to an article on Harvard Business Review that talked about how machine intelligence was about to change the world. It was interesting enough, although talked a great deal about MI being a "predictive" technology. As I've expressed many times, the human desire for sages of the future is deep and a … Continue reading Plus ça change
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