AI: Artificial Intelligence or Alternative Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is today’s buzzword that has been buzzing around more frequently with higher and ever-increasing intensity every passing day. Reason is as clear as a crystal: Its power and possibilities it can create.

A Gartner prediction goes on to say that AI bots will power 85% customer service interactions by 2020 and will drive up to USD 33 trillion of annual economic growth.

A report by BCG and MIT Sloan Management Review suggests that about 75% of global executives believe that AI will enable their companies to move into new businesses. Almost 85% believe that AI will allow them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. Among global leaders, the report further adds that 75% have identified the business cases for AI.

Per a market research firm called Tractica, the annual global revenue for AI products and services will grow from USD 643.7 million in 2016 to USD 36.8 billion by 2025, a 57-fold increase!

AI is nothing but the science of embedding cognitive abilities into machines. Simply said, it is to allow machines to undergo myriad numbers of experiences (Model training, its technical phrase) so that it would decide what works in what scenarios. This is not about coding into the system but allowing, rather enabling the system to code for itself. All you have to do is to be an informed facilitator; yes, here ‘informed’ will have a dark underline.


I am yet to decide whether to subscribe to the Elon Musk school of thought — which I know would force me to imagine a wicked grin from a robot — or to trust the sanity of the average human being picking up this closed book of AI which has barely opened. It doesn’t really matter who thinks of AI highly or lowly but one thing is certain: Its time has come. Before you buy time in realizing and delay in deciding of its adoption, it may come and stare straight in your face! You may not even have the bargaining power that you still enjoy today. Let me share with you some thought nuggets to chew over its probable potential:

Google’s Pixel Buds are the ear buds that can translate spoken language in real time. You wear the buds and someone in an unknown language when talks to you, the buds will translate it in your ears. During your talking turn, hold the right ear bud and talk in your language, and your Pixel phone speaker will give the translation for the other.

Computer vision - Facebook built an AI called Lumos to understand and categorize videos. The team at YouTube too is busy making sense of the video content — whether it’s dancing, walking, or standing; whether professionals or amateurs are dancing etc.

The future would be in designing things such as making robots learn how to immaculately pour cereal into a bowl learning itself from the videos of people doing it.

If you like a trendy bag from a stranger, all you can do is take a picture and upload on a site, and AI at Alibaba would give you the bags available to shop that best resemble the photo.

Be it a planning your next vacation to picking up the dress for the occasion to choosing a stock suitable to your risk appetite, AI bots will soon be at your disposal.

AI in its early ideation stage had assumed the title of Artificial Intelligence but with the dawn of 21st century it started seeing the sunrise with the hope of scaling up data and computing power. While multiple people have expanded the term to make their points, I too am taking liberty in stretching AI to drive my message home. To me AI is in a true sense an Alternative Intelligence to Human Intelligence. It has quickly picked up as an Applied Intelligence and rapidly progressing in top gear to be the All-empowering Intelligence.

Perfectly put by Andrew Ng, AI is the new electricity. Just like electricity took on a mammoth task to transform the globe about a century back, the baton of mass transformation was then given to the internet and is now shared with the AI which is currently spearheading the cause.

As Victor Hugo famously said, “An invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come,” AI is not a guest for the first half of the 21st century; it is the proud and prepping host for the second half of it.