1. Cognitive Computing and Neuromorphics One of the rising tides...

1. Cognitive Computing and Neuromorphics

One of the rising tides in the computer industry has to do with “cognitive computing” – or, as it used to be known, “artificial intelligence”. Software has been getting more intelligent for a while, to the extent that it can now make good on some of the failed promises of science fiction.
IBM’s Watson software is incredibly powerful, and able to eat enormous amounts of unstructured text, read it, and extract useful information from it on a dizzying array of topics. The same software, with minor modifications, can serve as a lawyer, doctor, and chef.
Google’s “Knowledge Graph” is a similar piece of technology. Advanced techniques like ‘Deep Learning’ are letting computers analyze unstructured images and audio and extract detailed information about their contents. Microsoft has a Cortana app that can take any picture of a dog and tell you the exact breed with high accuracy, an application that was science fiction a few years ago. IBM is pioneering the use of low-power neuromorphic chips to speed up AI processing. Computers are finally getting smart.

Jobs from lawyer to diagnostician are on the verge of being mostly or entirely automated – but a more substantial impact comes when this technology meets wearable technologies and the Internet of things. Omniscient artificial intelligence that knows everything about your life and can work for you.
This is a technology that will be able to find you jobs and new friends, give you medical and legal advice, and pay your bills and manage your money. This technology is both the most exciting tech application to come along in a long time, and the biggest potential privacy nightmare ever.
According to the former lead of the Watson project,
“Cognitive computing is the most significant disruption in the evolution of computing since the advent of the Internet. It helps extract patterns and insights from data sources that are almost totally opaque today, what is sometimes known as ‘dark data’. Examples include extracting disease insights from healthcare records and social feeds, or finding financial fraud or opportunities from discrete geopolitical, social, and business events.”
The ability to build intelligent systems that know more and think faster than humans, is going to make a lot of things better in a lot of broad, hard-to-measure ways. What happens when CEOs can pipe all of their data into a big analytics engine that can intelligently answer questions and put together arguments for various strategies? What happens when your doctor lives in your phone and can take a look at that lump the second you notice it? What happens when machines can design experiments and test hypotheses without human intervention?
Of all the technologies on this list, artificial intelligence is the one that’s going to have the biggest impact. In the same way that the Internet changed our lives in ways that nobody could have foreseen, so cognitive computing is going to reshape and improve things in entirely unexpected and powerful ways.
Humanity is headed headfirst into a century that’s going to contain at least as much change (and possibly a good deal more) than the last one did. Innovations as large as the automobile and the Internet are coming, and our lives, in a few decades time, are going to look very different than they do today.
Andre Infante