Thoughts on AI

AI is a trendy term, and some non-IT and IT folks alike, frequently exaggerate its potential.

But everything could change very quickly.

It is believed, that the main quality of intelligence, and particularly AI, is the capacity to ask the appropriate questions rather than simply provide answers.

Once search engines such as google etc are instructed where to look, they can aid to a big extent, in adequately finding some ‘answers’ to most questions.

However these engines cannot interpret the results yet and human input is required to sift through results to find appropriate  and relevant answers.

AI will be better equipped to locate the proper answers if it learns how to “frame the right question” and know where to look for the answer in the enormous amounts of data available to it.

Doing such tasks require a lot of capacity and it is the hope that AI will be capable of doing these very crucial initial stages then take it a step further and interpret the findings.

Framing of the right question is the “golden chalice” which is hard even for very intelligent experts to do consistently.

In this era, AI appears to be some distance away from perfecting the input-process-output model. The downstream portions comprising the process and output appear to be currently performed better.

At the end of the day, AI is currently better than most other systems existing as it moves beyond black box models of information systems. However AI is still constrained by boundaries of traditional systems and the adage of “garbage in, garbage out” still appllies.

Most AI systems willl simply just return an output that is well structured and presented but will nonetheless return an output that is comparable to the input.

AI is still evolving but its evolving quite fast.

It would still be too optimistic to expect hugely transformative miracles just yet.

Steve Magare is the founder of IQ Informatics . He is a health innovation enthusiast, E-health researcher and health Informatics professional interested in finding innovative solutions that can be useful in improving healthcare particularly in less developed economies