Letters to the CEO: machine learning

Thinkers50 asked me for a contribution to a book they are working on entitled “Dear CEO”, which will be published over the summer and that will feature letters from Tom Peters, Alex Osterwalder, Roger Martin, Whitney Johnson, Henry Mintzberg, Erica Dhawan, Richard D’Aveni, Costas Markides, Dave Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith or Don Tapscott, among others.

My letter, “Changing the way we understand technology”, has been chosen to be pre-released as an teaser to the book, and has now been published on the website of Kromann Reumert, a Danish legal and business consulting company collaborating with Thinkers50.

It’s an attempt to explain to a hypothetical CEO how technology has gone from being a simple automation tool to gradually being able to analyze vast amounts of data, learn from that data and carry out deep learning processes or reinforcement learning that will change the world as we know it.

In itself, a machine being able to beat the best humans at chess, Jeopardy, Go or poker is not that important; it is what it shows, that machines possess a brute computational ability far superior to any human brain and that they are also capable of understanding and processing natural language better than many humans and can even devise new strategies to compete against themselves in a way that no human has been able to do.

Machines are also able to study situations using incomplete information and make better decisions than any human could. The letter, in short, is an attempt to put into perspective something that many people still have not fully grasped, but that will bring about the most important change we have experienced in our history.

I would like to thank my friends at BigML, a company to which I am a strategic advisor, for the opportunity they have given me in recent years to learn and understand the technologies involved in machine learning. Without this fundamental obligation keeping me up to date, it would have been infinitely more difficult to understand its true scope and dimension.

The full text of my letter, along with a comment from Torben Waage, partner at Kromann Reumert, is available here.

(En español, aquí)