"Future of Everything" - What the experts have to say

At WSJ's Future of Everything Festival, a lot of experts discussed their takes on AI. David Siegel, Co-chairman of Two Sigma Investments, felt that smaller competitors are losing to tech giants who are achieving significant advantage through data collection and application of AI strategies, “a situation where it’s very, very bad for economic growth and creative disruption.”

Technology has caught a speed that the entire globe is finding it crazy to keep up with, and in situations like that it is but natural to wonder all the possibilities and what-if’s. It is not easy to trust AI, especially when it has the power to be quicker than a human mind in recalling and providing a better output than the brain. Sean Gourley, Founder and CEO of Primer said, “Machines can be very good at recall, they tend to see everything. Humans tend to have a little bit of advantage on precision. If you think about a very high performing algorithm, 95% precision linguistically is actually very good. 95% for us will get C in the term paper…It’s not the precision, it’s the recall. The recall on humans, even on experts that are following certain systems is only about 60%, whereas machines is up to 90%.”

 Maybe in a way it is scary that the machines are scoring more and have a better probability of acquiring a job, in a country of their choice. Talk about competition! However, are they really competitions or was this always our inevitable future – the next generation computer.

Amy Webb , Founder or Future Today Institute shared her opinion saying, “When it comes to the future of AI there's too much misplaced optimism and fear. We have anthropomorphised computers and the notion of thinking machine for hundreds of years, and we have these indelible references to “thinking machines” from pop culture…in reality, we are the containers for the squishy computers in our heads, and Artificial Intelligence is the third era of computing and it exists not in Rosie the robot but in many different forms and in many different ways that don’t look anthropomorphised at all.”

I wonder if it’s too soon to come to any conclusion, yet, or is it too late!