How bio-inspired deep learning keeps winning competitions

This article was first published on 2 January 2013.

The key point to make here is that this is yet more evidence of serious progress being made in the field of artificial intelligence.  

I posted a number of thoughts on this a couple of days ago in relation to the U.S. Navy’s progress in developing a completely autonomous, artificial intelligence driven military jet and it’s worth going back and having a look at that post.

In my experience, people tend to be very wedded to the idea that there are a large number of things that only people can do.  The reality is that that list is getting shorter by the day and there’s a long list of well funded, extremely intelligent researchers in universities, think tanks and private industry working on making it shorter every day.  It’s a pretty safe bet that the list of areas where people can outperform machines will continue to get shorter in the future, probably at an increasingly fast rate.

I personally become very nervous when I hear people in senior leadership roles assert that machines or artificial intelligence will never be able to do something because it’s too complex and will always require people.  Things in this area are moving at “warp speed” and the risks to businesses in a broad range of industries are very real.