A.I. THE EDGE
HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN REVOLUTIONALISE THE WAY YOU DO BUSINESS IN INDIA
Manipal Hospital’s ‘Tumour Board’ has a panel of qualified oncologists from radiation, medical and surgical streams. Since January, 2017, ‘ Watson’—IBM’s artificial intelligence and deep learning framework—has had the honour to occupy one of the seats on the board. Even as specialists evaluate a case, Watson presents its own diagnosis, along with recommended line of treatment. It evaluates the 130-140 parameters of the patient fed into its system against tens of thousands of cases it's already been trained on.
Doctors can vary their treatment, or can query Watson live. The doctor is still the boss, though. “Watson is part of decision making process across our seven hospitals for cancer patients,” says Dr Ajay Bakshi, MD & CEO, Manipal Hospitals. Manipal evaluated the impact on two fronts: 600-odd research cases of past patients and clinical cases under treatment. Among past patients, 85 per cent of Watson’s recommendations were identical to the treatment given by Manipal’s doctor. “In another 8-9 per cent, they found Watson recommendations useful and might have considered that option as well,” says Bakshi. Among clinical cases, over 1,000 patients are currently signed up at Manipal to be diagnosed and evaluated by Watson and get recommendations for free. “When you work with Watson, you start with a base level of capability it already has,” says IBM India’s Chief Digital Officer, Nipun Mehrotra.
Welcome to India’s tryst with artificial intelligence (AI)—small steps for technology but a giant leap for businesses. Start-ups in particular remain the most enthusiastic adopters. An estimated 200-300 startups have built business models around AI since large tech firms starting sharing their tools and platform two years ago. “But the number of start-ups is about 5,000. That number also needs to go to 80-90 per cent,” says IBM’s Mehrotra. Mid-sized firms have tried gingerly but big corporates are circumspect. They remain laggards, passing off chatbots, basic automation and big data analytics as AI. It is not.
AI, by definition, is human-like intelligence in machines. An AI machine must pass the ‘ Turing’ test whose origin dates back to 1951 when Alan Turing published a paper proposing ‘ The Imitation Game’ test of machine intelligence. Simply, it means a human interacting with a machine shouldn’t be able to figure out whether it’s a human or a machine at the other end. That stage of machine intelligence is a three-stage evolution curve. First, in the Smart Stage, machines will take over human actions as robots and software bots already do. Most of AI of today exists in this stage. Next—in the Cognitive Stage—autonomous products and services such as self-driving vehicles will be the norm, though machines will work within the perimeter of expertise. Finally, there’s Adaptive AI—a human-like intelligence and learning capability—where machines will exhibit human being’s ability to watch, listen, understand, learn, build new capabilities and take decisions on the go.
There’s a raucous debate on in the technology world whether humanity should go that far at all! If yes, how much? Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have shot barbs at each other. Others such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking joined in (see The Big Debate).
Cisco’s iconic Executive Chairman John Chambers, who’s transitioned every technology shift in the past 40 years believes AI will happen irrespective of objections: “Benefits far outweigh disadvantages. Artificial intel-
“AI, MACHINE LEARNING, NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING ( HAVE) HUGE PRODUCTIVITY ADVANTAGES.” JOHN CHAMBERS Chairman, Cisco
ligence, machine learning, natural language processing (have) huge productivity advantages. You’ll live longer. It will solve a lot of key illnesses. Standard income can go up dramatically.”
AI: FORWARD AND AHEAD
True to Chambers’ spirit, nobody’s questioning whether or not to use AI. The question always is: how to use AI? The world of AI is trying to surmount THE three inferiorities of machines against humans—brain, eyes and ears. The brain’s job of understanding, learning and evolving is catered to by deep learning/machine learning; visually recognising and processing information is being addressed by techniques such as optical recognition; and, listening and responding with voice by natural language processing techniques.
Five global tech firms have emerged as the Top Tier of providers of these AI tools—most of them on the cloud. The oldest—IBM’s Watson; The most aggressive—Google; The gentle slayer—Microsoft; and, the quiet Gorilla—Amazon. All provide APIs (application programming interfaces) to businesses to build their products and business models using their AI tools. A dark horse is Facebook which neither agreed for a meeting nor responded to BT’s questionnaire.
AI of today is no different from what was called ‘Neural Networks’ in the mid-80s. “What has changed since is the amount of data and computational power,” says Amazon’s Rastogi. AI got a major boost in the past two years as global tech firms opened up their APIs for developers to build businesses on them. For instance, Google’s Tensor Flow machine learning offering was opened to developers as recently as 2015 while Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit opened in January 2016.