Читать книгу Artificial Intelligence for Marketing - Sterne Jim - Страница 13

As you are an astute businessperson, you are asking whether the investment is worth the effort. After all, this is experimental stuff and Google is still trying to teach a car how to drive itself.

Christopher Berry, Director of Product Intelligence for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, puts the business spin on this question.7

Look at the progress that Google has made in terms of its self‐driving car technology. They invested years and years and years in computer vision, and then training machines to respond to road conditions. Then look at the way that Tesla has been able to completely catch up by way of watching its drivers just use the car.

The emotional reaction that a data scientist is going to have is, “I'm building machine to be better than a human being. Why would I want to bring a machine up to the point of it being as bad as a human being?”

The commercial answer is that if you can train a generic Machine Learning algorithm well enough to do a job as poorly as a human being, it's still better than hiring an expensive human being because every single time that machine runs, you don't have to pay its pension, you don't have to pay its salary, and it doesn't walk out the door and maybe go off to a competitor.

And there's a possibility that it could surpass a human intelligence. If you follow that argument all the way through, narrow machine intelligence is good enough for problem subsets that are incredibly routine.

We have so many companies that are dedicated to marketing automation and to smart agents and smart bots. If we were to enumerate all the jobs being done in marketing department and score them based on how much pain caused, and how esteemed they are, you'd have no shortage of start‐ups trying to provide the next wave of mechanization in the age of information.

And heaven knows, we have plenty of well‐paid people spending a great deal of time doing incredibly routine work.

So machine learning is great. It's powerful. It's the future of marketing. But just what the heck is it?