Читать книгу The Innovation Ultimatum - Steve Brown - Страница 24

About 120 years ago, electrification changed the world. Electricity refrigerates our food, washes our clothes, lights our homes, and powers our factories. Electricity transformed every industrial sector and now powers modern life.

Roughly 60 years ago, the first digital computers were built. Initially limited in their capability, computers evolved into powerful machines that brought us word processing, spreadsheets, the internet, video games, social media, streaming media, and smartphones. Like electricity before them, computers transformed business and changed our lives.

Artificial intelligence will have an impact as profound as both electrification and the digital computer. AI luminary Andrew Ng is the former chief scientist at Baidu, former lead of the Google Brain project, and now runs Landing.ai, a company that solves manufacturing problems using AI. In 2017, Ng observed, “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don't think AI will transform in the next several years.”

Artificial intelligence is a huge deal, worthy of the first and longest chapter of this book. Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, once said, “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.” While hyperbolic, this statement from the head of one of the world's most powerful tech companies should make us all sit up and listen.

AI's hype is largely justified. Just as digital technology was a vital component of any successful business strategy in the 1990s and 2000s, so AI must be central to strategic plans of the 2020s.