Part 2: Wither the Human Brain?

Part 1 introduced artificial intelligence or cognitive computing, the characteristics of the technology, and how its increasing use is consistent with another trend, which is the generation and consumption of vast amounts of data.

Big Data and Cognitive Computing

Floods, deluges, vast oceans of data, pour in remorselessly from the computer systems that hum behind the scenes of modern life, everything from banking to travel to any form of commerce, to data generated by all of us texting away on our smartphones, to the embarrassing excesses of email flooding every inbox with spam, to videos and photographs posted on social media of special meals and holidays to devices themselves sending signals all the time. Your car, your smartphone, airplanes in the air, any connected device, is generating data all the time.  

(Technology geeks call these Big Data and the Internet of Things, among other things. Analysts talk about ‘billions’ of connected devices and by some estimates, sometime in the first decade of the 21^st century, the number of connected devices exceeded the human population.  IBM says that some 40% of all data generated by 2020 will come from devices and machines.)

Part 1: Wither the Machine Brain?

A two-part series, examining the growing trend towards cognitive machines, or artificial intelligence, and what it means.

Skynet comes Alive?

It’s almost inevitable, given dire warnings about the threat to the human race by some prominent commentators, including a billionaire and visionary entrepreneur, and one of the world’s most prominent physicists, that you would associate Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the rise of the machines, aka, Skynet, aka the Terminator.

Futurists predict that it’s only a matter of time before we create a computer that’s smarter than the human brain, and after that the very smart machines can create even smarter machines, eventually leapfrogging the capacity of human intelligence.  It doesn’t take a Hollywood imagination to predict the doomsday scenario of super smart computers creating machines with capabilities vastly beyond the human ken – after all, even the lowliest computer today can out-compute, at vastly superior speeds, the average human.

Humans however, have always been able to think, and therefore outsmart fast, efficient computers programmed to do whatever they’re programmed to do.  Until now.