MIT AI Course, complete.

I’m happy to say that I “completed” my six-week AI course at MIT. It took approximately eight to ten hours a week of commitment which was a lot for me while juggling my entrepreneurial responsibilities. I found myself trying to get a mini head start by squeezing in an hour or two during the week but the heavy lift was always at night and over the weekends.

There were some very smart folks spanning six continents in my group of approximately fifteen people. A few like me, were non-technical executives. Others were in senior AI technology leadership positions and were extracting more how-to knowledge at a much higher level than I was.??

Each week we focused on a different module; Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Robotics, and how AI impacts people. We covered a lot of territory culminating in the final week when we were asked to develop a a strategic plan to integrate AI into our own businesses.

There were a lot of interesting factoids along the away—from AI officially getting on the map in a 1956 research project at Dartmouth to Google’s AlphaGo AI beating the world Go champion in 2016. I learned about the different flavors of AI, its sub-categories, and about algorithms. We talked about how AI is being used to spot poachers in Africa and can help us better detect earthquakes. The list is long.

I was also reacquainted with?Porter’s Strategy?which forces you to pick a lane with your business and how you categorize yourself for competitive advantage. This is worth a look for your own business if you can spare a few minutes to review it.

In short, I learned a ton, and feel confident about how to move forward on integrating real AI capabilities within our organization and how to steer our clients into using it to their advantage.

Here are my top five takeaways. (I’m happy to elaborate if anyone has questions and/or thoughts):

My top five takeaways:

1. AI isn’t new – we’re simply at the tipping point.?Since 1956 AI has been maturing. We have all seen waves of innovation come and go. This is the equivalent, if not significantly greater than, the internet age. AI is not a flash-in-the-pan, it’s technology that will permeate our lives and businesses as it matures.
2. Easy entry to AI is via automation.?The more rote tasks you can automate the more time and energy you save. You may see people using AI to record and capture notes during a Zoom meeting. There are tons of off-the-shelf, readily available tools to start using now.
3. “Collective Intelligence” is our new normal.?Hard science has proven that an individual’s human intelligence is not as strong as a group of humans working/thinking together. Similarly, a single machine is not as strong as a collection of machines. And lastly, the combination of humans and machines together consistently outperforms one or the other alone. This was perhaps the greatest point MIT was making. AI plus Humans is the winning equation.
4. Listen to Darwin and adapt.?Depending on the source, there could be as many as 300 million jobs displaced by AI by 2030. On the flip side, there could be more just as many or more jobs created by AI. I firmly believe that companies that don’t embrace technology quickly will go out of business. Traditional film photography was replaced with digital photography. Blockbuster was replaced by Netflix. Cabs by Uber. There are countless examples of adaptation over time. It’s time to pay attention and to learn and embrace AI.?
5. Don’t be afraid. Human subjugation is a long way off.?Surprisingly, or maybe appropriately, MIT did dedicate a good amount of time to the subject of fear of AI. My own interpretation of this was that we’re a long way from Skynet subjugating humanity. Machines cannot reason--yet. Autonomous vehicles can’t decipher between a plastic bag and a squirrel, nor determine their purpose in the world. Robots can move boxes from one place to another but can’t clear a table in a restaurant. And they (the machines) have no context, without humans doing the programming.?

You might be asking, why I took the course??

The first reason was to simply learn about a subject I didn’t know enough about, and worse, thought I knew something about but really didn’t. And of course, the talk of the town for the next decade is going to be about AI. So I better know something about it. And knowing about AI and its applications for my own business and that of my clients is critically important.

I’d recommend everyone get educated quickly about AI. And I would recommend this course as a great entry point. (No, I’m not getting spiffed)

Look forward to continuing the conversation.?

“I’ll be back.”