How Do You Define AI?

Can we agree on how to define AI? Bloomberg Businessweek, Twizzlers, and Microsoft Azure Cloud are referenced in this episode of The AI Minute. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://amzn.to/2vgENbn... Transcript: Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the phrase “artificial intelligence” is occurring more and more often in earnings calls. Just a few years ago it wasn't mentioned hardly at all, and now there are hundreds of mentions of it. Now, to be sure, this is warranted to some degree. Artificial intelligence makes breakthrough after breakthrough, and it's frankly difficult to keep up with them all. But the reason the phrase is so easy to work into a corporate narrative is because AI is a term that doesn’t mean anything in particular. It has no agreed upon meaning. This stems from the simple fact that intelligence is a term that likewise has no agreed upon meaning. At its simplest, AI is something that responds to its environment, but that is an incredibly low bar that applies to your sprinkler system that is able to detect when the yard is dry or the cat food dish that feeds the cat when the food gets too low. A more useful definition is a system that responds to a dynamic and changing environment. In other words, a system that learns as it operates. Hershey recently announced a system that I think qualifies. In the past when they made Twizzlers, the rope like candy, they either had to overproduce to make sure they got enough in the bag, that is to match or exceed the weight, or they had to weigh the bags repeatedly over and over, but recently Microsoft Azure Cloud was employed to track 60 million data points in the manufacturing process so that the system can adjust in real time and make exactly the right amount of Twizzlers. Now that’s a real-world legitimate application of artificial intelligence. http://bit.ly/2Zpy0Ki gigaom April 19, 2019 at 03:33PM