The reality was actually somewhat less radical: bots have developed their own languages for years - the problem was Facebook wanted them to develop in English, but this was beyond the capability of these machines. This theme came up again a couple of weeks ago when reports emerged of bots in Facebook’s AI lab developing their own language and supposedly causing engineers to end an experiment in panic.
Science fiction is full of dystopian visions of a future where those laws fall apart and the robots take over, one of my favorite examples being 2015’s excellent Alex Garland film Ex Machina. Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics as portrayed in his 1950 book I, Robot, which was made into a film in 2004 starring Will Smith, are as follows:Ī robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.Ī robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.Ī robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.Īll very noble objectives, and we shall see how they play out in the future - if we haven’t all been blown up in a nuclear war with North Korea before then.
The computer processing power is all there – humans just need to work out how to best deploy it.
One difference is that the rise of AI isn’t constrained by the lack of bandwidth that held back the rollout of mobile. The reality is taking a while to catch up with the hype. I remember the endless "this is the year of mobile" conversations in the early 2000s when soothsayers looked forward to the future of communications, and it feels a little like that. Watson is certainly leading the AI charge over at IBM and there are a number of other interesting developments in businesses involving AI, especially in the field of customer service and e-commerce optimization.īut when you dig beneath the surface and try to find some real-life marketing case studies to bring the hypothesis to life, which PRWeek has been doing for a cover feature we are running in October, there’s not so much out there. One of the biggest topics at the Cannes Festival of Creativity in the south of France this year was AI, or artificial intelligence, which was a ubiquitous topic on La Croisette.īut I wonder how far down the road we really are when it comes to genuine activations involving PR and marketing, and how much is just hype and bluster.