Ben Rogoff, director of technology at Polar Capital, thinks, however, that a time when we are comfortable with machines making decisions for us is a long way off still.
In his presentation at the Morningstar Conference this morning, entitled Global Technology — Transforming the World Bit by Bit, he discussed the outlook of the global technology sector and highlighted key themes and emerging areas of interest.
Mr Rogoff, a technology specialist for 20 years who used to work for Aberdeen Asset Managers, was asked about the recent artificial intelligence symposium.
He said: “I’m massively bullish on a longer term view of artificial intelligence.”
He said it depended though on what is regarded as AI, for example, IBM’s cognitive computing project.
In the long run, he said that “machines will make better decisions than human beings”, being able to use, theoretically, data such as population statistics.
He referenced robo-advisers as one area where this is starting to happen, but he believes it will be “a very long time before people let machines make decisions”.
He believes that “we want expertise augmented by algorithms”.
He said that “tech is all about algorithms that stop you bad decisions” saying, for example, that Tripadvisor was about preventing a bad holiday choice and LinkedIn about avoiding opting for a bad recruitment.
Cars are becoming “computers on wheels”, he said, as he predicted that 70% of all cars by 2020 to become auto-braking to stop a driver sleeping at the wheel or from making other poor choices on the road.
He said his take on AI was that “ultimately we’re talking about big data”, with e-commerce and advertising the more immediate applications than the bigger vision of “changing the world”.
He also cited the advent of personalised medicine as potentially being able to make a substantial dent in healthcare budgets.
He said: “Ultimately, I’m a huge believer that all of the stuff we’re talking about means that you can apply computing to things that you didn’t before.”
But he said the “sad reality” is it takes many years for a great idea to be taken from research in the lab to practice.