Will Skynet soon be a reality?

Big data will drive AI in unimaginable ways in the coming years. A future full of wonder, amazing opportunity and invention.

Data is being used to make decisions in ways people thought belonged only in science fiction. As technology has evolved, so has the amount of data collected and our ability to translate it into insight and value. Data that took hours to process only a few years ago takes seconds today.

In the nineties, supermarkets were using data mining techniques to identify products people frequently bought together to improve the layout of their stores and the effectiveness of their promotions.

In the noughties, Amazon led the way with their recommendation engine fast becoming the benchmark ecommerce experience, taking what supermarkets had been doing and directly influencing what customers bought. The likes of Netflix and others have taken this further, using data tracking consumer behaviour to perpetually refine it’s business model and ensure relevance.

Today, big data is used to better understand major humanitarian crises, predict drought and food shortages in the developing world and develop medical advancements. Local governments are using data to inform how we develop cities looking at everything from transport infrastructure to crime prevention. Insurance companies are using it to inform the premiums they charge and banks to detect fraud. Sports teams are using it to inform the players they sign and those they let go. Intelligence services are using it to predict possible terrorist attacks and inform military strategy. Make no mistake, it’s everywhere.

The Internet of Things is connecting almost everyone and everything you could think of. Sensors are increasingly prevalent in everything from your phone to your jeans and the washing machine. In fact, the washing machine will soon tell you you’ve left your phone in your jeans! Sensors can monitor our health, weather patterns, traffic congestion and where you are each and every second of the day. This is spawning a ridonculous amount (means a lot!) of data, which when meaningfully parsed may hold life changing innovation opportunities. Did you know it’s possible for mobile phones to be used to detect chemical warfare?

People are positing that it’s not long before these technological advances will allow us to predict crime in an almost Minority Report-esque way.

Technological developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing will drive the coming evolution of Big Data wherein instead of asking questions of particular data sets, these technologies will simply need a question and themselves decide on the best way to answer it.

Skynet — well it’s not really that far off is it?