AI - a sampler of business applications

"The only thing I know is that some really wise and smart people are really worried about artificial intelligence." Easy to dismiss as the words of some Luddite. Just that these came from a well-read and highly inquisitive mathematician.
Another, a senior banker, commented on the right-wing wave that seems to be sweeping the world, "The danger isn't machines thinking like humans. Instead it's humans thinking like machines." The reference was towards the cynical manner in which right-wing politicians and their henchmen have deployed AI-powered bots to manipulate public opinion via social media.
Was it John McCarthy or Dr Philip Mayne Woodward who first coined the term 'Artificial Intelligence'? Historically, the latter did but it was McCarthy who is most associated with the field. The word gained prominent usage after the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 helmed by McCarthy which concluded a long study into the area of artificial intelligence. There is a lot to write about the works of both these phenomenal scientists and scores of others but clearly this work is still developing in multiple directions.
Moving on, evidence suggests that technology's primary value is in the creation of wealth or at least arguably a "better standard of living". The latter term is open to all sorts of interpretation and criticism at the macro and micro levels. For example, is the environmental damage caused by the disposal of personal computer circuit boards worth the "better standard of living" available to a select few.

But let's stick with the "better standard of living" argument. Which in turn loosely translates to more wealth for a few through the application of this technology to business. The business applications of artificial intelligence are premised on a fairly straightforward thought. Quoting Steve Holder in an article published in the SAS Canada website, "It's about doing the jobs humans can't realistically do within time, labour and budget considerations. Self-driving cars may be a sexy application, but the meatier ones will be taking place behind the scenes at banks, government institutions, and enterprises of every stripe."
That's it. After cutting through the maze of neural networks, LISP and ALGOL programming mimicking human thought and the likes, it all boils down to making things cheaper, faster and better. Preferably without pesky, emotional and possibly lazy human beings.
Right now, we are at the top of the hype cycle. Remember 'Big Data'? Well that's run its course and at this point everything that's linked to artificial intelligence and machine learning gets higher attention at the investors' table.
"It's fascinating that entrepreneurs expect to get a couple of million dollars worth of evaluation by adding a '.ai' extension to their domain name," according to a Dubai-based venture capital guru.
Alexa and what do you want to hear: Alexa and the artificial intelligence ecosystem built around it have propelled Amazon on a trajectory that has pulled it away and ahead of traditional rivals, Apple, Google and Facebook. Waking up and arguing with a virtual assistant is no longer the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. If you aren't already, get connected. Voice payments and voice commerce are quite likely the future. No more fidgety passwords and typing in card details. Look out for the collateral impact. Visa and MasterCard are networks to watch. They can gain substantially from this phenomenon. Probably more so than the uptick from ApplePay and Samsung Pay.
Tesla and 2024: Tony Seba of Stanford states that as the year when gas-powered cars will be museum pieces, retro fantasies for petro-heads. Check out Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 . EVs like Tesla will have a comparatively negligible number of moving parts, which is their big advantage over hydrogen, hybrid and other rival platforms. That apart, swarm technology and AI will firmly mitigate a number of idiotic human practices such as tailgating on the SZR. There is the dark question relating to machines taking judgement calls on whom to save or not in dire situations. But ethics is not part of this discussion.
Airports and train stations: A number of human-controlled processes will get eliminated in the immediate-to-near future. The first to go will the process of check-in which in many ways has now become purely a bag-drop process. Next in line will be the immigration queues and in fact immigration gates themselves as the combination of artificial intelligence and biometrics reaches a level of maturity enabling faultless identification. In the longer term, security checks will be a thing of the past as travellers start permitting carriers and security authorities to monitor their movements ahead of trips. Low cost carriers that embrace artificial intelligence from the ground up will gain hugely from cost advantages.
Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is another area of deep interest although many would argue that it is not truly AI. It mimics that actions of typical workflow related tasks such as the reading, inputting, correction and decisioning of form based data like what is pulled out from application forms, invoices and field reports. Veli-Pekka Mustonen reports a good use case in the blog You-get. The case describes the manner in which Volvo has applied RPA to the management of supplier invoices. It has reduced the repetitiveness and errors associated with manual and partial automation of processing over 2,000 supplier invoices a day.
Capital and the creation of wealth: This is a thought-provoking argument but one which has not yet been tackled. When Deepmind's AlphaGo became the default Go master, it opened the gates for the complex question regarding the control of wealth. If capitalism is a game for the talented or privileged few to amass enormous amounts of wealth then it stands to reason that the captains of business would deploy it to their own gain. In any case, in its current format, artificial intelligence has been critiqued for creating job losses at one end and enormous wealth for promoters at the other. There's an interesting opinion piece in Worldpost by Feng Xiang on the subject.
Expect to see a lot more on the subject in this column.
The writer is founding partner at Bridge DFS, a bespoke financial advisory firm (www.bridgeto.us). Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy. He can be contacted at sanjiv@bridgeto.us