Magazine Fall 2016 Issue Frontiers

Predicting a Future Where the Future Is Routinely Predicted

Artificial intelligence systems will be able to give managers real-time insights about their business operations — as well as detect early warnings of problems before they occur.

Andrew W. Moore Reading Time: 4 min 

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Frontiers

An MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management.
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Predicting Future

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:

“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”

Workers on the factory floor have suddenly gathered at a point along the production line. Some are scratching their heads. Others are gesticulating wildly. Most stand with their hands in their pockets. Something is wrong, and no one has thought to call management.

In the near future, scenes like this one will be obsolete. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), managers will be alerted to workplace anomalies as soon they occur. Unusual behaviors will be identified in real time by cameras and image-processing software that continuously analyze and comprehend scenes across the enterprise.

The hunch-based bets of the past already are giving way to far more reliable data-informed decisions. But AI will take this further. By analyzing new types of data, including real-time video and a range of other inputs, AI systems will be able to provide managers with insights about what is happening in their businesses at any moment in time and, even more significantly, detect early warnings of bigger problems that have yet to materialize.

As a researcher, I learned to appreciate the value of early warnings some years ago, while developing algorithms for analyzing data from hospital emergency rooms and drugstores. We discovered that we could alert public health officials to potential epidemics and even the possibility of biological warfare attacks, giving them time to take countermeasures to slow the spread of disease.

Similar analytic techniques are being deployed to detect early signs of problems in aircraft. The detailed maintenance and flight logs for the U.S. Air Force’s aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets are analyzed automatically to identify patterns of equipment failures that may affect only a handful of aircraft at present, but have the potential to become widespread. This has enabled officials to confirm and diagnose problems and take corrective action before the problems spread.

With AI, we can have machines look for millions of worrying patterns in the time it would take a human to consider just one.

Topics

Frontiers

An MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management.
More in this series

About the Author

Andrew W. Moore is dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Comments (2)
Stephen Wales
This is a business magazine. I leave it to the innovators to whom I am grateful, to make their readings amidst "disruptive technologies".

Aside 
I am sure that "bot" technologies exist that would easily erase any grammatical errors in my comment here. Such is the benefit of "machine learning"; then again grammar would lose all meaning I suppose? Maybe we are indeed in the midst of an existential and societal "paradigm shift".
End Aside.

I have observed that the full expanse of academic discourse is devoid of acknowledging the paradoxical subtleties found when differentiating between intellect and intelligence.
The world of physics at least has declared "consciousness" as the tough problem. Then it is left at that.
Now we hear from many academic disciplines making reference to "a problem with meaning" or "we have lost our story".

I feel that we are at a point in history where adequate comparative analysis between intellect and intelligence can be introduced in "grade school" so that shared society can be arbitrarily introduced and the individual can feel enriched and connected as a result self-knowledge. Past educators have pointed to knowledge. Now we need to embrace and herald it. 

Meaning with respect to Intellect and intelligence, can no longer be conveniently combined or passed over, one for the other. I feel that we must continue to reduce our societal fears despite our entrenched biological stories. Easier to emotionalize than soberly articulate. Are we rushing to AI to articulate for us?

Indeed, our current educational systems still churns out "conscious" beings "filled with the flood of youth", and yet being made only partially aware of their full "tool set". It could be stated that the genius of noted educators, impart these additional tool sets through compassion and courage, and teach with a “belly sustained through wisdoms promise.  
Now we are all concerned with advancements in AI, and share in our bemusement. I feel we cannot develop a shared meaning of AI without acknowledging our full "tool set" of intellect and intelligence. 

My "hats off" to the new educators, who, with respect to their predecessors collaborate courageously in shaping shared meaning in discovering the benefits and distractions of AI.
Indubitable and Inalienable is the observed genius paraphrased within the human "being". 

Thank you for your article.
Antonio Carretta
AI detection of human beeings' behaviors and emotions will find hard times at dealing with fakes and other defense mechanisms. I guess we are still very far away from this Big Brother utopia and this is good news.