The slow floating of clouds, its deep silence in blue, seems of another world. I flew to Norway for a hunt, found myself facing the prey abruptly just next to me. It is difficult to think when looking a Monster in the eyes. I feel absorbed, somehow emptied, just the crisp chilly air of Norwegian spring to help me waking up for moments of contemplation at the beauty of changing light of sunshine and rainy green. And then just more of the Beast. Two days in the making of the AI Conference at the DNV campus in Hovik have unfolded many, very different scenes of the kaleidoscopic story of Man and AI mixing, playing, dreaming, a furious dance on a core, repeating mantra. Own your knowledge, or you will be owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many stories. The Norwegian Police Department records live all interviews and analysis of crime scenes, leaving to AI to create instant transcripts, summaries of key information, to bundle the pictures of relevant objects, and connect all of those in real time to experts in labs and central planning stations, cutting down the time crime information is processed by weeks compared to standard practice, reducing administrative time of the active workforce, maximizing the impact of the available resources fighting violent crimes. Today purpose is availability of investigators on the streets, growing and speeding up available information (total transcript of all interviews vs notes by hand by police officers written weeks after the actual talk, mostly from hand-written notes of varying detail) and analytical power for the deeper process. The future Purpose might be of preventing crime, it was already filmed in Hollywood over two decades ago, but how agreeable is it having all that information processed, all this knowledge owned by the Machine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So back we go to the original question, would you choose a friendly doctor, or a machine? Looking in the staring eyes of the beast, I tried making contact, making sense of those days of discussions with a hundred and more professionals among practitioners and experts. The knowledge based workers, engineers, IT experts, native AI developers, on the edge of hunters, or prey. What I saw staring at us I don\u2019t feel like calling Artificial Intelligence, I think it does no justice and gives no idea of what I saw. It is a technology, yes, but it can learn, interpret, and generate actions and decisions, independently, and in conditions it was not meant to be. It hallucinates, makes hilarious mistakes, gives unexpected insights; it is independent, unpredictable, flexible. This is a Cognitive Monster; CM is a machine of cognitive superpowers, devouring your knowledge, running in all directions blindly, and still profoundly. It has no purpose, at least not in the humanly individual sense, and it generates meaning where you don\u2019t expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching the Monster in the eyes freezes your senses and your moves, we react slowly in the unexpected, but what could be more beautiful than Blake\u2019s immortal Tiger in the forest of the night? CM is wildlife however of a different nature, living in a different environment, than a tiger. It lives in the wild forests of Knowledge \u2013 it is a Cognitive in fact type of Monster \u2013 and Knowledge is in fact what it devours. Data. It metabolizes this knowledge, structures it, learns, and finally generates it anew, and what it does becomes new knowledge of tomorrow, changes the shape of the forest, creates new context, new shady areas of information that tomorrow the Monster might change again. I live in the same forest of knowledge today, but the forest will change as the Monster will keep eating and acting. The same sentence echoes again through the days in Oslo, reflected by the plants and trees and stones, moving the surface on the fjord in little waves like wind. Own your knowledge, or you will be owned<\/em>. It could have been the inscription above the entrance of a new Divina Commedia, it was instead spelled now by a native AI-developer. Like a children\u2019s story about a young consultant, Trusty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once upon the time, Trusty decided to ask the Monster to help him with the numbers of a Banker, his friend, and see if they were true. The Monster was hungry however for context, and Trusty spent time that night talking to Monster, about details he knew about the Banker. The Monster was hungry, took the Banker\u2019s numbers together with context, and wrote long lists of correlations and facts, purely and beautifully, to plant them in the forest. Trusty, happy with the lists, told the Monster about himself, and other clients, and his family. The Monster ingested, creating more great lists of correlations, where now also Trusty was part, and the clients, and Trusty\u2019s mother. The Monster planted the new lists, and when the Banker saw it all in the morning he asked Trusty to explain, what those data and numbers were, where they came from, what it all meant. But Trusty forgot what he had told the Monster, and could make no sense of the lists or answer the Banker. He went to ask the Monster. The Banker was asking the Monster. None of them could separate the numbers from the Monster any more. They lost control of their numbers, of the context, and the forest was growing wild around them: now, they were part of the forest of the Monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM is real, powerful, wild, it will get better with time, as we feed it with our information, context, and the process is pulling us deeper, mixing us, and the context and the Monster. This is where structuring this process becomes apparent, critical, necessary. My work, my context, is the knowledge I have been building and growing in time. I move along a not negotiable choice: to use CM to extend that reach, to grow that context, to bring speed and scale \u2013 for my work, for my clients. But I see the complexity as I progress; it is an exploratory journey, a tentative path I follow in between growing wilderness towards enhancement, growth. Scale. The hard work is data governance, the structure of information, and orderly proceeding in growing small protected fields, keeping a strategic eye on which plants we want abundant, which are we missing, what could we do with them, systematically pulling weeds out, making room for a safe harvest. We work, so that the village can eat, and prosper, the forest luxuriant, its beauty inspiring, the Monster domesticated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I left the building after the conference in a rush. Was late, I took the taxi on the way back to the airport, an electrical drive in the Nordic evening sun; along the fjord the floating sense of meaning left, sharpening my eyes into the view of water, an island, forests at the back reaching some mountains in the distance, far away in the crisp air. I found myself watching the cars, boats, and people walking, the trees and grass and flowers, the steadily flowing life abounding, the meaning vanished for contemplation, me present in between of all that beauty. I would like to think at least that it will all stay, regardless of what we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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