Is our intelligence real or artificial?
Have you already caught yourself googling for answers and the day after forgetting the answer? Have you, as a parent, already been upset that your children are heavily reliant on published content from Wikipedia for school presentations and lectures without critically questioning their content?
The founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, has already called several times for a rethinking of knowledge transfer to our children in media-effective appearances. (Video here).
Access to knowledge is no longer a big problem for anyone today. Rather, it is a matter of finding the requested information correctly and quickly. With this filtering, a trained algorithm, which we commonly call artificial intelligence, will be indispensable in the future.
In 2018, USD 9.36 billion was invested in US startups dealing with artificial intelligence. However, this new record is based on a lower number of transactions (466 deals) than in 2017 (533 deals).
A major driver of the record are the large financing rounds in the Later Stage / Growth Stage, whose share rose from 19% to 32%. Seed financings, on the other hand, have taken place significantly less and now account for only 28% of all financing rounds. This means that the first big wave of investments in ideas around solutions with the help of artificial intelligence is already behind us. In 2018, investment in the expansion and growth of promising AI solutions increased significantly.
The most active company was Google Ventures with 70 VC transactions in 2018. With only 15 VC deals in the area of artificial intelligence, the Chinese Baidu ranks among the top 5 active companies worldwide.
Asia was able to close the gap to the USA in VC transactions. In the meantime, 38% of all Corporate Venture deals (CVC) are made in Asia (USA only 48%). Europe continues to lose ground and only reaches 17%.
The first wave of real effects of artificial intelligence algorithms has arrived in the mainstream. Google is the best at curating content with its search. Tailor-made information and recommendations are now part of everyday life at eCommerce & Co.
The second wave is increasingly gaining a foothold in the daily working world. It is all about predictions. In the B2B sector, for example, we find solutions for predicting optimum maintenance intervals for large-scale industrial plants. In the B2C area, the sales talk is supported with the help of evaluations.
The third wave, also called perception, will above all raise the user experience to a new level. A good example will be automatic re-orders for the refrigerator, so that all products will be in stock at all times.
The fourth wave will be responsible for fully autonomous action. Machines will be able to read our wishes “from the lips”.
The fusion of man and machine, however, as shown in several films, is certainly still a long way off.
There is fierce competition between the USA and China for wave 1 technological solutions. Europe is already lagging considerably behind there.
The same applies to Wave 3, where clear advantages can be expected on the Chinese side due to the state-funded data collection in China. Based on these data, algorithms for wave 4 will shorten the lead of the USA. China should sooner or later catch up with the USA in autonomous action. In wave 2 predictions — the USA will remain the leader. The reason lies in the structure of the economy. China’s factory operations are dominated either by full automation (JD.com) or a high manual share. Most production data is already collected in the American economy. Enterprise software is used almost everywhere. For the time being, this should be an advantage of the American economy compared to the Chinese economy, because the data volumes are already available and available for evaluation.
In this area, European companies also offer a large field for prediction. Our altogether 8 participations in the field of artificial intelligence such as Flexciton, scoutbee or mostlyAI offer a good information base, which is already technically possible and is used in industry.
The question asked at the beginning, whether our intelligence is artificial or real, I would answer today as follows: our knowledge (spool) is increasingly based on artificial basis. The creation of intelligent algorithms for linking the data to obtain useful practical results for B2B and B2C is still genuinely human.
I appreciate your comments. Best regards, Mato Krahl
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