The True Meaning of AI
Excerpts from an interview with Ginni Rometty, former IBM CEO, during an interview at the 2017 World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland
“AI said replacement of people, it carries some baggage with it,” Rometty said. “And that is not what we're talking about.”
In line with what Rometty mentions, artificial intelligence has garnered a negative reputation over the decades as a force that will eventually destroy humanity. And part of that has to do with the nomenclature, which tacitly defines AI as something on par with the human mind.
That's why we call it narrow AI, or, better yet, “These are technologies to augment human intelligence,” as Rometty said during her interview. “By and large, we see a world where this is a partnership between man and machine, and this is, in fact, going to make us better and allow us to do what the human condition is best able to do.”
“You have so much information … so much that if you don't do something, your brain, us as humans, can deal cognitively with all of that,” Rometty said. As an example, 8,000 medical papers are being published every day, an insane amount of information for any single doctor to read or review. And medical data is doubling every 60 days.
“You need a system that can understand all this data, could reason over it, and could learn, which means they do become more powerful with time,” Rometty said. This is the basic description of how machine ...
