What happens when the price of prediction falls through the floor? Old problems that were cast as computational problems become recast as predictive problems.
Consider what happens when you drive a modern car and press the brake pedal. It is not about compressing hydraulic fluid through a pipe to push a piece of metal against a drum. It is not even a physical event converting the pressure applied to the brake pedal into an electronic signal that tells the brake how to react. Instead it is one input to be combined with a series of sensors looking out at the road, monitoring brake conditions, assessing the weight and speed of the vehicle, pulling in data about the road, traffic conditions, and weather, and much more. Then a decision is made on the right course of action to take based on that data and the optimal outcome.
Physical has become digital has become prediction.
I was reminded of this in seeing some of the latest price points for Google’s Machine Learning stack, and the powerful platform that you now access on-demand for pennies:
https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/
And the latest from intel offering a complete AI development and test environment on a USB stick!
When the prices drop to this level, think about what happens when computation becomes prediction…..and you see the world in a new way….
