Interestingly, there are two features about the coming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that caught my attention today. The first in Wired deals with the use of artificial intelligence for efficient use of robots in warehouses, “using machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks.” The second in the New York Times deals with a computer vision system that uses, “artificial-intelligence software to analyze video images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior.”
In both cases, the use of AI makes sense of massive amounts of data and input, filling in a much-needed gap where humans often fail due to distractions. Both stories had a geospatial context as well, with the robots cataloging goods in three-dimensional space and the computer-vision system triangulating the activities of prison inmates and identifying the location of potential incidents.
AI has made rapid progress to make sense of the deluge of data that are being generated by sensors. This seems a perfect application of thinking machines to filter and assess the importance of rather mundane observations that put even our best human analysts to sleep. Our technology is increasingly helping us to understand ourselves.
