Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Michel Morvan, Co-Founder of Cosmo Tech (Part 1)

This is a dense discussion on decision support systems capable of handling complex problems. Requires technical knowledge to follow.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our readers to yourself and to Cosmo Tech.

Michel Morvan: I’m the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Cosmo Tech. We are a technology company. We create software to help decision makers make decisions in the most complex environment and being able to forecast the impact of the decision on their business. We do that mainly by using very sophisticated modelling and simulation tools.

The tools we create belong to the field of augmented intelligence which is the future of artificial intelligence. The idea behind augmented intelligence is to mix human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Once this is done, to give the ability to forecast so that you can do what-if scenarios and make decisions based on that.

Sramana Mitra: I would like to double-click down on that and hear more about a couple of specific use cases.

Michel Morvan: Before going to specific use cases, I just would like to talk about what is done today in artificial intelligence and why we need to do more. What I propose to do is to give you an image of what the situation is. For this image, I’d like to take an imaginary example. Assume that you want to buy a car.

You go to the car dealer. The dealer says, “I have this car. There’s a lot of AI in it.” You say, “Can I try it?” Then you start driving and you like the car. At the moment, it is getting dark, and then you look for the light. There are no lights. You ask the seller where it is. The seller says, “This is a very smart car. You have two rearview mirrors that can show you what was in the past. Based on that, you can decide to go to the left or right.”

For me, the way I see artificial intelligence today is mainly looking in the past and based on that, being able to make decisions for the future. What we provide with augmented intelligence is the lights. If you want to turn right or left, solely looking at the past is not enough. That’s a very important idea for us. If you want to make decisions, data and the past is not enough.

If you want to be able to forecast and understand the impact, you need more than that. You really need to understand what is happening. You need to turn the lights on and be able to see what is in front of you. The first part of this is to give an intuition why data is not enough. You cannot drive a car just by looking at the rearview mirror. The reason why AI is doing that is because today, AI tries to mimic the human brain. It tries to do what the human brain is doing.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Michel Morvan, Co-Founder of Cosmo Tech
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