3 Questions About Artificial Intelligence I Get Asked The Most

The term artificial intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy in the mid 1950s when he held the first academic conference on the subject. Since then, there have been some important artificial intelligence, or AI, milestones. From the first chatbot in 1964 to the use of neural networks to steer a self driving vehicle in 1989, to the 2002 debut of the Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner.

But this decade saw the combination of human's losing to AI on a television show and to a very popular but difficult board game. This has helped to create a permanent conversation around AI and its potential long-term impact on society. After all, many of us already use AI: navigation apps, ride-sharing apps, music/video streaming services, virtual assistants, and more.

AI is the hot topic of the moment in industry after industry. There is tremendous buzz about how it is being applied in the medical field and around the many ways it is being used to power the social good. But as expected, its impact on business is what people are most curious about.

A few years ago, I started collaborating with futurist, founder and CMO Naomi Assaraf to better understand how AI is being deployed worldwide. We did a joint presentation in New York City about effective AI tools for business, and over the last few years we have supported each others' Twitter posts about AI.

And like Naomi, I believe that any big, vigorous discussion about AI's history has to take into account how it was first viewed in the ancient world. In Pamela McCorduck’s groundbreaking 1979 book Machines Who Think, she writes that “artificial intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized, expressed in humanity’s myths, legends, stories, speculation and clockwork automatons.” These themes are also explored in Adrienne Mayor's excellent Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines and Ancient Dreams of Technology. You read about "autonomous, crewless ships" in The Odyssey, and, Hephaestus' "drone-like arrows" and "self-driving cauldrons". Writer Susan Olsen also has thoughts about Hephaestus, noting that:

[He]...fashioned mechanical serving maids from gold and endowed them with learning, reason, and skill in Homer’s Iliad. Designed to anticipate their master’s requests and act on them without instruction, the Golden Maidens share similarities with modern machine learning, which allows AI to learn from experience without being explicitly programmed. (emphasis added)

Yes, even thousands of years ago, people were thinking about artificial life and what it could mean for human-machine collaboration. So it is no surprise to me that in this age of rapid and almost mind-numbing innovation, AI is impacting our imagination. Indeed, no matter what country I speak in, or which topic I speak about, some of the conference attendees will always ask me what I think about AI. Here now are three questions I get asked the most.

1. "What are some of the best AI tools for businesses?" - Small businesses say artificial intelligence tools are desirable, but argue that many are outside of their budget. I know because startup founders and small businesses have expressed those same concerns to me. The good news is that AI tools are becoming more and more affordable. In my keynote address in May at the Digital Analytics and Branding Conference in Miami, I talked about some of the popular AI tools being used by businesses (of every size). Among the most popular ones is Lumen5, which takes text and creates video and images from it. It allows anyone to create the kind of quality videos that we only saw, for a long time, from news agencies and top NGOs.

Another great tool is Articoolo, which takes a few words and creates an evergreen blogpost for you. This could be a big help to businesses looking to establish a blog presence. In fact, as the New York Times points out, using AI to write blogposts and articles is already popular at newsrooms for The Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg, Patch, and Guardian Australia, among others. (More tools here).

2. "What are some of the hot AI jobs being created?" - A KPMG report this year indicated a range of AI jobs that companies should create/consider to scale their AI capabilities. The one job on their list that jumped out to me is AI Ethicist, which is a position that tech giants are hiring for right now. I am closely following AI ethics conversations on a daily basis because there are important questions about AI's impact - on employment, privacy and human rights - that need to be debated and thoroughly answered. The evolution and growth of this particular job role is one I will be paying lots of attention to.

3. "What is your favorite book on AI?" - I agree with Bill Gates and others that Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm are interesting AI books - books that have been mentioned at many dinner parties I have attended the past few years. But...my favorite book on the subject is Kai-Fu Lee's AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. It is so highly readable and absorbing that I read it on my 15 hour plane ride to Spain back in the Summer. The author offers descriptions of the tech cultures of Silicon Valley and China, and explores AI's future impact on the work force and global inequality. His book does strike a hopeful tone for humanity (in the latter part), but I won't spoil that portion for you. It's a great book that hooks you from the first page.

{This post was also published on the Medium Blog.}

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Sean Gardner is an executive board member with both Free Tech for Nonprofits and the World Communication Forum. He is also a global keynote speaker, business creative and digital producer who lives in the Seattle area. He currently conducts workshops and social media training for businesses, nonprofits, celebrities, and multinational corporations. Follow him on Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.