Emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the marvelous phenomenons of the New Internet ecosystem.

Artificial Intelligence is already here - part of our everyday life. Search engines match queries with Internet content and the matching process is an example of archaic, but true, artificial intelligence. So is the language analyzing process that places content related advertisements on www pages. Artificial Intelligence is usually a background, non-real time, process. Just like human beings fill information to their memory during the day time and process the information during sleep - also machines try to find repeating patterns in a non real time fashion. This is actually one of the typical characteristics of AI; creating associations between pieces of data; finding common structures.

For example Google creates the associative database (indexed relations) about the search results in advance and that's why Google is able to respond so quickly. Similar techniques are used to place advertisements among related Internet content. Artificial intelligence is very much human - it needs sleep- and it needs day time capturing of new information - sort of - that is much what Google is behind the scenes.

Internet based Artificial Intelligence is globally operated by few players like Google, MSN and Yahoo. They have huge amounts of processing and storage capacity analyzing Internet content. The processing power and memory is still expensive and it is optimal to share the results of AI. Internet is becoming a huge network that hosts a few artificial brains and lots of content on which these brains work. We humans have an important role as well - but the rudimentary analysis of the content is becoming more and more the task of artificial brains. Human intelligence and work is sometimes cost efficient but not so inexpensive that it could compete with the few global brains in the basements of the big Internet players.  

It requires a huge investment to create the capacity, plan the algorithms and create the brand to get successfully into Internet AI business and that’s why it is difficult for a new entrant to compete with the existing players. Legacy Internet AI companies have a competitive edge that easily sustains - no wonder why the front line AI companies are so popular among investors.

Artificial Intelligence is about discovering associations, indexing and storing relationships. It is about programming pleasure into a machine; defining the successes that the machine appreciates when it seeks for associations. Specialized AI applications may also have proto-patterns that the machine tries to find. Artificial Intelligence frees memory when the repeating patterns are found (like Google when it stores the indexed letters - not the internet pages). And Artificial Intelligence will be having a structures of feelings - many subtasks that seek for structures in some limited areas of content and  AI meta-machines that find meta patterns (meta-associations) between for example speech and picture.

We are privileged to be the generation that sees how global AI emerges and evolves. It brings us pleasure and benefit. Artificial Intelligence is part of our everyday life.

Piksu editors 2.2.2007 / Kai Nyman