FUTURE OF AI - ARTIFICAL NEURAL NETWORKS MY TOP DISRUPTOR
7 THOUGHTS ON A.I. IMPACTS ON WORK & BUSINESS
Happy to arrive at MIT to see Patrick Winston and Daniela Rus.
This was first posted on LinkedIn December 14 2017—Some thoughts on the future of work & business after my recent research trip to the US, during which I was privileged to connect with artificial intelligence luminaries Andrew Ng, Daniela Rus and Patrick Winston among others:
Continuing exponential change, all industries, all sectors, right through the next ten years. No question. Artificial Neural Networks are now cemented as my top disruptor.
Most disruption & opportunity to be driven by ‘supervised machine learning’ through next 5 years.
Thanks to Patrick Winston, who spent nearly two hours patiently walking me through what he believes will be the next generation of AI, I have no doubt that after that we will ‘move up the stack’ and teach machines to learn more ‘symbolically’ based on the way humans learn though language and stories. This will potentially bring even greater impacts.
Machine learning is turbo-charging ALL OTHER technologies. To cite just one example, the people at Neurable shared how AI accelerates the accuracy of the EEG readers they use for thought-control gaming. But indeed everywhere I look – transportation, energy transmission, farming, medical, security, insurance, finance, personal comms, cities, you name it – I see imbedded machine learning transforming incumbent technologies.
Very clever companies are right now playing multi-year chess games to acquire just the right data assets to create strategic new ‘pools of value’ from AI.
The US might be leading on science, but centre of gravity for commercialising AI has moved to China.
The imminent arrival of ‘general machine intelligence’ and skynet-type consequences, as talked up by such as Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Hawking, remains a total, unmitigated load of rubbish. The science is far, far away, and what’s coming already is disruptive enough!
I also took time to examine the methodology behind the infamous Frey & Osborne paper concluding 47% of total US employment is “at risk”, which has somehow morphed in the public discourse to “47% unemployment.” Let’s just say this: Oxford has produced papers to be prouder of in its 900 year history. God knows we all love a headline, but NO ONE knows what the numbers will be, and no one accounts for new or enhanced jobs, services and industries. Life is crazy enough without this kind of nonsense adding to the stress.
To all my friends, colleagues & associates: have a great Christmas and a wonderful New Year.
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Update, June 6 2025—Eight years on and I’m pleased with how well this holds up:
Top disruptor, all industries, all sectors? No question. And the world now well and truly knows it!
Imbedded ANNs and machine learning transforming everything, everywhere? Bang on.
The symbolic learning branch of A.I. has not blossomed, but LLMs + multimodal A.I. + agents have achieved largely that vision. Point 6 was a bit premature.