The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge

I’ve been on the AI train for quite a while. Sounds like the next thing humans will do but you never know it may end up like the disappointment genetics ended up being despite the promises of 1990s.
Google AI recently spanked someone at the game of Go, considering that “someone” is one of the best humans at Go, that’s something.
Suddenly everyone is sitting up with many bandying around the belief that there would be Armageddon when machines take over the world. It won’t probably end that way but then who knows? What I know is that AI has been quietly creeping into our daily lives without anyone even noticing. Your smartphones are chuck full of blistering AI technologies. When Siri is bantering about all sorts of rubbish, you think it’s your cousin?
For me the greatest challenge AI can face is being able to analyze video – recorded or live stream.
Before I go into more explanations, AI today can check a picture and identify items in it. Facebook can see a picture and identify all your friends in there. Scary enough? No, hear this: Facebook can identify you from pictures even when your face isn’t visible.
All I want is to have AI watch a video and tell me the plot of the story or watch a live camera feed and tell if something untold is happening. This is beyond facial or material identification, this is AI understanding plot!
At least I can spare myself the horrors of watching Batman V Superman and let the damn AI just tell me it ain’t worth visiting the cinema.

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

2 thoughts on “The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge”

  1. Microsoft unleashed their twitbot and Boys promptly taught the AI a thing or two http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-silences-its-new-a-i-bot-tay-after-twitter-users-teach-it-racism/. AI will make headway in some fields and need more time in others. plus with faster networks and computing systems, sometimes what we call AI might just be traditional computing crunching and pushing the data around much faster.
    When a machine reviews a movie like you suggested or comes up with non-plagiarized poetry that’ll melt a hardened Unilag runs-girl heart, then I’ll be real scared and start watching out for T1000s in the streets.

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