The Future of Advertising: Artificial Intelligence & Creativity
By: Rhoda Sell
Tags: Big Data, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Creative Technology, Digital Marketing Agency

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”

— Roy Amara, The Institute of the Future, 2006

Over the past three decades, everything has become interconnected and over half the world’s population are now online. Meaning that four billion people are spending on average six hours every day using internet-powered devices or services.

The speed at which technology is advancing has led some to predict an imminent “fourth industrial revolution”. The first revolution being steam power, the second electrical power and the third digitalisation.

The speed of advancement is most visible in the endurance of Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that fit on a computer chip doubled every year, forecasting that computer power would continue to double biennially for the next ten years. This prediction sustained over 50 years of accuracy. Although it can be argued the law became a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by big corporations investing heavily to maintain the pace.

Ray Kurzweil built upon Moore’s Law with the “Law of Accelerating Returns” looking beyond circuits to wider trends in exponential computing growth, believing that in the 21st century 20,000 years of progress will be seen in just 100 years. Ultimately predicting that “within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence”. The point in time when advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, can create machines that are smarter than humans is known as the ‘Singularity’. At SXSW in 2017, Kurzweil predicted the Singularity to be feasible by 2045 supporting Schwab’s belief of the incoming fourth revolution “blurring lines between physical, digital, and biological worlds” or as Kurzweil sees it humans becoming “a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking”.

Regardless of which revolution is unfolding, it is undeniable that rapid technological change is altering every aspect of human life — culturally, socially and economically.

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An Overview of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence often gets labelled as a buzzword of the 21st century. However this isn’t the first time, AI has repeatedly been overestimated for decades. The term was first coined in 1955 by John McCarthy as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines“ but after realising the limitations of computer hardware at the time research halted, not seeing the second burst of interest until the 80’s. Fast forward to now, and technology has reached a point where AI appears to be within reach, driven by key advancements:

Big Data: As devices have become connected and usage has grown, so has the data created. Data has seen an annual growth rate of over 50% since 2010 and “Data is to AI what food is to humans.” Computing Power: Ongoing improvements in GPU computer capacity, ever decreasing costs for that power and the advent of cloud-based services, have begun to democratise AI, in turn boosting opportunities for mass research and development. Deep Learning: A direct product of points one and two. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, both of which are integral to AI progression. Machine Learning focuses on giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Deep learning expands on that, instead utilising our ever-expanding understanding of the human brain to create artificial neural networks that mimic the activity of neurons to better abstract information from large datasets.

Gartner Hype Cycle, 2017

“AI everywhere” was tipped as a megatrend over the next decade due to the position of multiple AI-related emerging technologies on the Gartner annual hype cycle report. However, for many of these technologies sitting at the top of the ‘peak of inflated expectation’, there is still a ‘trough of disillusionment’ to follow. As Amara’s Law states “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.

Nonetheless, “Silicon Valley loves a fad”, and the current rate of investment in AI might just propel it through inevitable disillusionment a little faster. Tech giants are investing significantly, for example, IBM’s Watson and Google’s DeepMind, but with a focus on their corporate strategies, there is a need for democratisation to ensure that potential benefits are created safely and distributed equally.