For decades, science fiction has portended the arrival of artificial intelligence, typically as a threat. That's a perception today's champions of the technology are working against, and one of the driving forces behind a four-year, $5 million global cognitive computing competition, The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE (ai.xprize.org). The competition seeks to crowdsource the world's creative genius around AI, and thousands of competitors have already signed up to participate. Consulting spoke to Marcus Shingles, CEO of XPRIZE, about the perils and possibilities of the coming real-life AI invasion.
Consulting: How did the XPRIZE and Watson collaboration come to be?
Shingles: In terms of the general spirit, I'd been speaking to Executive Chairman and Founder of XPRIZE Peter Diamandis about some of the narrative around artificial intelligence getting hijacked by a very dystopian notion. Not without good reason, by the way, but the narrative was very much on the potential negative downside or risk. You heard a lot of prominent people making statements about this over the last couple of years. The goal was to take this amazing technology that was finally being democratized where it could really be used at scale for a number of applications and do something at XPRIZE with IBM where we talk about and direct the narrative into a more problem solving, making an impact for good discussion about AI and actually use XPRIZE to demonstrate it. There's so much promise and opportunity here, let's demonstrate this collaboration between people and AI and have it be used for good before the narrative becomes a runaway train.
