The AI Book

CHAPTER 4Navigating a Sea of Information, News and Opinion with Augmented Human Intelligence

By Andreas Pusch¹

¹Founder and CEO, YUKKA Lab AG

We are drowning in an endless sea of new information. Google reported that the number of web pages has grown from 1 trillion in 2008 to a whopping 130 trillion in 2016.¹ Even though a majority of these might be irrelevant to your or your company’s interests and operations, it is equally true that well-informed decisions will have a major impact on the success of any project or investment. While the amount of information is growing, the human ability to read and digest information has stayed rather stagnant in absolute terms, and even decreased in relative terms. Research has shown that an average professional reads 5–15 articles per day from 1–3 sources. Not only is this a negligible amount compared to the actual volume of news published each day, but there is also an undeniable information bias driven by personal preferences and valuable time lost reading nonsense. It is thus easy to get lost in this growing sea of information, which leads to wasted time and prevents well-informed decision-making.

But what if we could be one step ahead? What if we could objectively analyse hundreds of thousands of articles from thousands of professional sources within a matter of minutes? This would not only give us the opportunity to understand an industry, a firm or another entity in greater depth while minimizing information bias. It would also enable ...