AI and Hype - Another 'AI Winter' Around the Corner?

There’s a lot of hype about AI at the moment.

So much, that companies using good ‘old-fashioned’ predictive analytics, with a bit of closed-loop capability to provide machine learning, are describing it as some sort of Artificial Intelligence. Facial and voice recognition for example are clever, but they aren’t AI. It's a bit like saying that Sat Nav is the same as a self-driving car, which clearly it isn't (even if it might get you home more quickly).

Let’s remember - Alan Turing nearly 80 years ago suggested that machines were only ‘intelligent’ if we couldn’t work out whether we were communicating with a machine or not. (The ‘Turing Test’.)  Isn’t Real AI about communicating in natural language, and at normal speeds - which doesn’t mean s p e a k i n g  s l o w l y       to some sort of chatbot.

With all the hype, don't we run the risk of repeating mistakes of the past?

‘AI Winters’ happened when AI capabilities were over-hyped and under-delivered, resulting not only in a loss of confidence but also a loss of essential funding. In fact, we shouldn't even think of there being 'one' AI Winter but several. (Things got so bad that AI - and other Apps like 'facial recognition' - became dirty words.) I write about it in my new book.

It also seems to me that almost every conference in town now needs an AI context. But talk to those on the ground, and many are still struggling with the basics of MI and Business Intelligence, let alone AI. Feels like there's a disconnect somewhere...

Some suggest that an AI Winter could never occur again, and whilst we aren’t yet in an AI Summer, we are at least in some form of AI Springtime. I’d like to think so. Some of those clever Apps like facial recognition, once scorned, not only get me through passport control but keep me safe on the street. My glass is half full on the topic.

Not everyone sees things the same. Over a liquid lunch (and a different type of 'glass half full') recently in the City of London, my 'learned friends' wondered whether all the hype around AI, as well as Insuretech and Fintech, amongst others, might be a bit like the ‘dot com’ bubble. They wondered if we’re all going to have an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes moment’?

Even with an AI Springtime, shouldn't we look on the bright side? Didn't Tolstoy once write in Anna Karenina, thought by some to be one of the greatest novels, “Spring is the time of plans and projects.”

And if an AI Springtime at least is a time for thinking about the future, don't we all deserve to have a voice in that debate?