An Era of Machine Intelligence

Gartner Group recently released their annual list of the top ten strategic trends in business. These trends focus on new technologies and how they are being used. They tell us a lot about how technology is shaping our world.

One of the major underlying themes in the list they produced this year is that of intelligence. It is clear that your technology is going to be much more intelligent in future and be able to interact with users on a much more intelligent basis.

By intelligent, they mean an ability to receive input and draw conclusions from it, make decisions and recommend courses of action.

Artificial intelligence plays a big role in this trend and is already being embraced by many companies. So we will see smarter devices in the world of the Internet of Things, as well as smart apps that can make decisions on the basis of data and other input. With the growing usage of oral input to computers, where it is predicted that in the relatively near term, most interaction with computers will be oral, combined with the greater intelligence of computers, we will see the prospect of being able to discuss problems with our computers and come to better decisions. Add in virtual reality and it is possible to foresee an ability to interact in such a way that all sensory perception is used to help in analyzing data, something that could be a big help in coping with big data.

As always, there are pros and cons of these developments. Technology has already replaced a lot of jobs but smarter computers will be able to replace a lot more. So far, most of the jobs replaced have been of the menial variety - repetitious and simple. However, as the intelligence of computers grows, more complex jobs ill be replaced, including some of the traditional professions, like accounting, architecture, many aspects of law and even medicine. But new professions are being created. We already see a strong demand for data analysts. And we are beginning to see a demand for machine trainers - devoted to providing direction to that intelligence.

The question one has to ask is - when will computers be given the right to vote (sic)??