The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger

But information is not self-explanatory; it is context-dependent. To be useful—or at least meaningful—it must be understood through the lenses of culture and history.

thizs is the essence of how to use AI in business

As online information has exploded, we have turned to software programs to help us sort it, refine it, make assessments based on patterns, and to guide us in answering our questions. The introduction of AI—which completes the sentence we are texting, identifies the book or store we are seeking, and “intuits” articles and entertainment we might enjoy based on prior behavior—has often seemed more mundane than revolutionary. But as it is being applied to more elements of our lives, it is altering the role that our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.

AI use

In unsupervised learning, the training data contains only inputs. Then programmers task the learning algorithm with producing groupings based on some specified weight of measuring the degree of similarity. For example, streaming video services such as Netflix use algorithms to identify clusters of customers with similar viewing habits in order to recommend additional streaming to those customers. But fine-tuning such algorithms can be complex: because most people have several interests, they are typically grouped within several clusters.

marketing

Or an advertiser or filmmaker could supply a generator with a few images or a storyboard, then leave it to the AI to create a synthetic ad or commercial. More concerningly, generators might

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Network platforms perform these tasks by aggregating information and experiences on a much broader scale than a single human mind or life span can accommodate, allowing them to produce answers and recommendations that can seem uncannily apt. When considering the purchase of winter boots, for example, even the most dedicated individual shopper would never assess hundreds of thousands of national and regional purchases of similar items, consider recent weather trends, factor in the time of year, review his or her comparable prior searches, and investigate shipping patterns before deciding which pair of boots would be the best purchase. An AI, however, might very well assess all these factors.

But even in such a scenario, many users, if given the choice, would rather not be limited to a network platform that hosts only their compatriots and the software offerings and content they produce. Instead, the dynamics of positive network effects will tend to support only a handful of participants who are leading the technology and the market for their particular product or service.