But during the coronavirus pandemic, things are anything but normal.
[Read:This free AI chatbot helps businesses fight COVID-19 misinformation]
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Fraud detection systems that home in on anomalous behavior are confused by new shopping and spending habits.
And shopping recommendations just arent as good as they used to be.
Suppose youre running a bottled water factory and have several vending machines in different locations.
Every day, you distribute your produced water bottles between your vending machines.
In the beginning, you start by evenly distributing your produced water between the machines.
But you realize that some machines run out of bottled water faster than others.
You train the AI algorithm on the date, location, and sales of each vending machine.
You soon realize that your AIs predictions are not very accurate, and it makes a lot of errors.
After all, a lot of factors can affect water consumption at any one location.
The machine at the high school is pretty busy during the academic year and idle during the summer.
The vending machine at the park sells more in spring and summer on sunny days.
You have more sales at the library during the final exams season.
More importantly, while they can dig out correlations between variables,machine learning models dont understand causation.
Our AI, however, knows nothing about people and outdoor activities.
This doesnt pose a problem as long as nothing unusual happens.
But according to your AI model, it is mid-July and you should be refilling the machine every day.
A ceiling collapse is not a major event, and the effect it has on your operations is minimal.
But what happens when the coronavirus pandemic strikes?
The museum, cinema, school, and mall are closed.
And very few people dare to defy quarantine rules and go to the park.
Andnarrow AI systems, what we have today, are very bad at dealing with the unpredictable and unusual.
Your AI is not the only one that is failing.
We humans, too, are confounded when faced with unusual events.
But we have been blessed with intelligence that extends way beyond pattern-recognition and rule-matching.
We have all sorts of cognitive abilities that enable us to invent and adapt ourselves to our ever-changing world.
You know that people wont stop drinking water when they stay at home.
So you pivot from vending machines to selling bottled water online and delivering it to customers at their homes.
Soon, the orders start coming in, and your business is booming again.
For the moment, what we have are AI systems that can perform specific tasks in limited environments.
Thats the kind of AI that can innovate and quickly find solutions to pandemics and other black swan events.
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