Jeremy Howards take on Artificial Intelligence

We are in the midst of an exciting period where the development of computer and communication technology gives us new opportunities. What we do with our phones, we could have hardly imagined just a few years ago. It is basically positive that we soon will have entirely new opportunities to solve everyday problems and technical challenges in both medicine, transportation and information. There’s probably not a single area of society that is not affected by this new wave of technology. In the end this will lead to major changes to us humans according Jeremy Howard, CEO of the company dedicated to the advanced machine learning, Enlitic.

Below you will find my summary of Jeremy Howards speech and key points.

1. Traditionally, to teach computers to do things has required detailed planning by the programmer which he or she had to program every command in the smallest of detail.

2. The issue that has driven research on artificial intelligence, machine learning, or big data have been about how to get the computers themselves to draw conclusions and learn based on the information provided by us humans. Howard says that research on self-learning machines began back in the 50’s. The challenge back was much more simplistic, like how to make a computer beat a human in a game of checkers.

3. There are a number of fascinating examples in the presentation on how machine learning can be used. Mr. Howard started a medical diagnostics company. It should be noted that neither he nor his colleagues had any medical training but relied on self-learning computer algorithms provide good diagnoses.

4. The development of AI is moving rapidly forward. It is based on the “normal” development of computers and computer networks. It is also based on the fact that the self-learning computers are great tools for developing better self-learning machines. In other words, the development help itself – it becomes an exponential development. Howard points out that already 25% prefer the computer-proposed text line. Give it a few years and the computer will surpass human beings for translating text.

5. There is tremendous potential in the technology. It can thus be us great benefit and joy. Medicine, nursing, advanced data processing, self-propelled vehicles, automatic writing … The possibilities are limited right now more by our imagination than anything else.

6. Now the computer has become good at reading, watching images, analyze and write, what happens to the labor market? Howard points out that about 80% of the labor force in the developed world are working on what computers have just learned. The pace of development as this is doing that we will face dramatic challenges on the labor market and how we are reshaping society to ensure security for everyone.