AI Factory — Human advancement vs Raw Human Thoughts?
Have you ever wondered how you get to view the TV shows of your genre, listen to your favorite music, and even get recommendations to buy some additional products along with your preferred products on Amazon?
Perhaps not, as we enjoy getting these recommendations leading to simplification in our lives where we are all absorbed in our day-to-day activities. Such recommendations only make our lives easy absolving us of any additional thinking we may have to do. In the process, humans have started depending heavily on these software and machines to influence their lives and help them make decisions. For example, there would be a time when a person would think twice before buying an ancillary product on top of the product they would buy or even research what else can they buy to associate with a set of sofa or electronics. Fast forward to 2022, and we don’t need to worry about it. When buying a sofa, we would get a recommendation of a coffee table and some potpourri as well. in the process we end up buying things we may not have bought or would have thought multiple times about it. Similarly, a decade ago, we would have mp3 players to listen to our favorite songs. Now we have Apple music which can build our playlist at any time and as we use it further, the playlist becomes more attuned to our taste. The key to such mind-blowing things lies in a factory, the AI factory.
Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm and every organization and person is embracing it. In layman terms, AI factory (Artificial Intelligence) is a large cohort of data driven algorithms which improve their results over time as they get more training data from users or sources and model its predictions to provide recommendations. The more a user starts using Apple Music, the greater is the probability of Apple Music matching the tastes of the user. We get amazed at how Amazon, Netflix and Apple are able to resonate with us, but this is the beauty of AI factory which is not only present in technological behemoths but spreading its wings in banking industry and FMCG business as well. Introduction of any predictive model or machine-based learning will always raise eyebrows on elimination/mitigation of human capabilities and the situation is no different with AI factory. The question lies in it really matching raw human intellect or advancing the humans by oversimplifying their tasks.
While raw human intellect can always precede any machine-based decision, but it seems that AI factory actually enables more rationale based results owing to the level of data modelling and training that is done on data. Training on data implies that historical data is used to identify trends and apply decision sciences to come at a conclusion. Being a proponent of technology and a keen observer of AI factory in the industry, the results coming out of it are amazing. The level of accuracy that can be achieved against our expectations makes one believe that AI factory is the way to go. Imagine the time you would take to think of 100 of your favorite/recommended songs. AI factory with its vast expanse of data that it gathers whenever a user comes onboard the Apple music or any other apple-based application and builds standard features based on demographics, clicks and browsing history while linking it with common set of people with similar interests. This data is then used for training to identify trends and generates predictions which will match the user expectation. Such a powerful process is now easily expandable across all industry domains leading to increasing productivity and better day to day life cycles. All this would not be possible in a day’s time by relying solely on raw human intellect.
Raw human thoughts bring a unique combination of data, emotions, and intrigue of the human mind of the picture which is difficult to be cracked via the AI factory models. One may be in the mood for buying something fancy to gift themselves, but they have not been buying anything above $100 for the past 2 years in a single purchase. Amazon will not be able to read into your minds and recommend a fancy product. Only upon initiation of a search for such products by you, the recommendations will pop up. Similarly, you may be in the mood of listening a song completely different from your genre owing to a different mood, but Apple Music cannot get into your mind and realize that. Such elements of raw human thought will always precede the concept of AI factory and enable some elements of inaccuracy in the predictions. The question lies in how comfortable humans are with such variance of predictions and recommendations.
At present, it seems that raw human thoughts can be ignored most of the times owing to the extent of simplification and advancement that AI factory is bringing about in our lives. Only time will tell whether the tables will turn again, or we will evolve into an artificial intelligence-based world.
