Digital Banking 32

Artificial Intelligence, from laziness and vertigo to excitement

The first time I looked at Artificial Intelligence I felt a mixture of laziness and vertigo. Laziness because it was a very stale term that emanated all kinds of images quite unappealing to my eyes; ranging from the fiction film styled ones picturing AI as a scenario where humankind would end up enslaved or confronted with robots and dictatorial computers, to those where academics enjoying an endless discussion on statistical methods and concepts. Vertigo because I believed that it was necessary to understand and master all these concepts, and was not very confident in my intellectual capacity.

Sometimes the trees do not let us see the woods. One has to step back to see them. Ask, study, travel, learn, think, conceptualize, .... And with all this, one goes from vertigo and laziness to illusion. Today I understand that the new hype of the Artificial Intelligence has its raison d'être in the quantity and quality of data available nowadays and in the technical capacities we have seen develop in the last years. The information was already there, and surely, we have even more today, but now we can access it - which is already an achievement in itself - and do it in a methodical, fast, safe and cheap way. And the technical capabilities allow us calculations and processing the NASA engineers who put the Man on the Moon would have dreamt of, and even more important, allow a better human machine interaction and the creation of a collective intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is developing unstoppably in two fields. The first is a usual suspect, that of advanced analytics. Advanced is a term relative to time, and likely in the future we will think how primitive we were today. But today we have an extraordinary capacity to predict what the future will be based on historical information, to find correlations between data, to cluster data, to extract knowledge of the information, .... With this reality we live every day, even without knowing it: from weather forecasting models to systems that predict what next product we will buy or whether we will divorce based on buying behavior with our credit card. As the years have given me a cynical point, I always wonder whether the future is as predicted or whether it is this way because we have behaved based on the prediction.

The second is the interaction between human and machine. Some have said that Artificial Intelligence is the new UI [User Interaction]. I believe it goes further. The capacity for verbal communication - I dare say that through senses that go beyond touch - with machines, the ability to use our own way of expressing ourselves - the famous 'natural language' -, the ability to express ourselves in our mother tongue, ... have changed and will change even more how we interact with computer systems. But I want to go a step further as far as communication implies dialogue, and nowadays machines have the capacity to answer to what we are asking and in a personalized way, attending to who we are - 'I am me and my circumstances', would say Ortega y Gasset .

And I want to take another step even further, and reflect on the fact that Artificial Intelligence currently continues to depend on feedback provided by humans, on a teaching that is facilitated by people, … which leads us to conclude that Artificial Intelligence will be as good or bad as the human teachers are. There are those who have summarized it in a simple 'Which university has your robot gone to?'.

And the last step, probably the one that fascinates me the most: technology (and consider all social networks) is allowing us to create a new intelligence, a collective intelligence, immediate and accessible by everyone through the internet. An intelligence that allows us to evolve, grow, improve.

We have a fascinating world ahead. And it is exciting.