The evolving beast within artificial intelligence

By looking at the search engine giant, Google, who owns 87% of the market share of all digital search, we will quickly learn how they need to constantly adapt and evolve their own search algorithm. In an article by SEO Hacker, there is evidence to show that Google will update or change something about its search algorithm every day!

While some might think this is insane, it makes total sense to me because the moment people figure out exactly how elements of Google’s search algorithm works, they will instantly manipulate the system and bastardise the whole ranking process. That's just human nature for you.

Revolution of digital enhancements

The advancements in user demand, hype, technology and the digital age, have created a need for a revolution of digital enhancements to fit into every part of daily life with maximum impact.

The field of market intelligence (MI) was a clear witness to this synergy. Market intelligence functions by mining data, and after the completion of that process, the curation of the insights which were discovered are then addressed, measured and actioned.

These include the possibility of expansion, sales predictions, customer trends, competition developments, and business profiles. Tools, such as intelligence and crowdsourcing's evolution, to analyse the overall amounts of information are poised to revolutionise how marketplace intelligence functions.

AI and big data present in everyday lives

Failure to incorporate such strategies may lead to businesses being jeopardised by competing companies and rivals. Artificial Intelligence and big data - as 'far out' as it may seem is more present in our everyday lives than ever before, we just aren't aware of it.

These examples show that AI stands not only to replicate human behaviour but to exceed human capability. (scary!) Artificial intelligence holds competitive advantages in its capability to compute massive amounts of information and then teach itself how to utilise this information more effectively and efficiently.

‘By the year 2020, there will be roughly 33 billion objects linked to the web’.- Gartner

These devices generate immense levels of data. According to EMC, an information storage and computing company, there were 4.4 zettabytes of information in the digital universe in 2013. EMC expects this number to balloon into 44 zettabytes by 2020.

The rise of the internet of things

Furthermore, the rise of the internet of things could revolutionise information collection by providing accurate, concentrated, and actionable info in place of unstructured text, voice, and video.

For instance, a smart fridge could detect when a user consumes a product, how much is consumed, and how frequently a product is repurchased. The same smart fridge could then detect the weight of a milk carton when it is placed on the milk tray inside the fridge and then determine when the milk carton is getting lighter, and thus sound an alert to buy more milk as the milk is running low. This reminder to buy milk could then be sent to you via text, IM, to your car or whichever means you choose.

This is more than just a few cool settings on your Apple Watch, this is a new way of life.

The proliferation of big data both from the quantity and quality of info provides the marketplace intelligence with unprecedented resources, but also with remarkable challenges in transforming those resources into actionable and meaningful insights.

Even when equipped with statistical and information analysis applications, the outright amount of info available is greater than human analysts can process. As processing power increases immensely year on year, the ability of AI-driven devices to calculate terrific amounts of data at high speeds is continually improving. Beyond sifting and aggregating info, artificial intelligence may identify patterns from incomplete or noisy information sources and possibly emulate intelligent behaviour to produce meaningful conclusions and outputs.

Finally, artificial intelligence is likely to be capable to act upon such analysis independently, continually polishing up and improving on its capability to understand the context of a situation and develop more accurate behaviour driven data.

Conclusion

For many, the integration of artificial intelligence, robots and machine learning in our lives is a scary and obtrusive event. One which causes a lot of panic and anxiety where there is no need.

AI is here to stay BUT, AI is not human, you are! Therefore, there will always be a crucial need for human skill, human intervention and the human emotions to oversee, monitor and maintain a profitable and function AI system.