Why A.I. is Disrupting The Small Business Space (should you be worried)

Disclaimer: This was not written by A.I. this article is my understanding of the current research papers and studies done on A.I. in todays market.

A.I. is actually more prevalent in everyday life than most would assume. Take for instance auto texts that guess what you'll write next, or personalized ads that seem to know exactly what you're interested in. For years, (since world war 2) artificial intelligence has made progress and found a place within our everyday lives, so why is everyone talking about it all of the sudden?

In the past, funding has rolled into A.I. research until a major obstacle appears and completely halts progress. It might have been due to slower computing speeds, or smaller data bases but one way or another something has stopped the leaps and bounds it could make.

What's changed about A.I. today making it a more exciting topic for businesses now?

In simplest terms, a breakthrough in A.I. has opened a new door for understanding how to make the technology not only more efficient in learning, but also significantly more effective at doing tasks once thought could only be done by humans. This breakthrough came in the form of "deep learning" which was pioneered by?Rina Dechter?in 1986. Its approach to make a neural network to building A.I., meaning it will learn and discern through multiple layers of analyzation to reach an output unlike before where it would just have one layer of analyzation. An example of this in layman's terms would be looking through a box of red and green apples and sort them through color in the traditional machine learning model, applying the deep learning model you might also consider sorting out the spoiled apples due to rot, or seeing there might be variations of red apples such as a Fuji apple or Honey Crisp apple and making new boxes to further sort.

If the discovery and development of Deep Learning and Neural Networks was in 1986 why is it's potential only starting to be understood today?

Deep learning is the breakthrough we needed in the original A.I. that was once blind to the same weights, measurements, and layers of thoughts that we go through in decision making. This issue was again funding and the ability to process data at speed to even make the technology usable along with the real world data and proof that this even works.

Then something huge happened at a time where our ability and advancement had also reached the opportune time to test it. COV**D 19. Around the time of this happening huge achievements in the development of A.I. were occurring including but not limited to, beating the best players in the world at the game of GO, competitions of color sorting, and deciphering genetic coding creating companies like Crispr.

This was the once in a lifetime opportunity to unleash a system designed to devour large quantities of data at rapid speeds and pinpoint critical data. The use of this neural network design was built to help lead scientist to the exact thing the vaccinations should target...

AND IT WORKED.

This real world test, proven now by the pressure of a pandemic catapulted the research and added the validation that neural network are the future of A.I.

The timing of all this leads me to my assumption from the research; since the pandemic gave real world validation and proof that it does work A.I. is on everyones mind and the products we're seeing are on a completely new level. What's possible with this new processing concept is still being discovered, but what's come out of a worldwide shutdown is proof that this system is bigger, and better than any we've seen before.

Businesses harnessing this technology to get compressed, and better data are taking advantage of what they can now use to turn their ideas into reality in less time and with less work.

Should you be worried?

From what I've read I see A.I. as a tool still - not a replacement. Although its ability to take massive information and simplifying it is superior to a humans it does have issues. Like humans, A.I. can develop a bias. If data is filled with a subconscious bias the A.I. will adopt it, while also learning to prey on our subconscious bias. This could affect the true effectiveness of a system build to help us make decisions better (for obvious reasons). We will always have more to understand and learn about the capabilities of technology but as it gets better so do we. Our ability to create is what gives us an edge in the world and being able to do so faster by knowing the correct steps is essential. I see A.I. demolishing jobs as much as I see it creating new ones and opening new opportunities to make us more efficient.