First Click: The death of garbage in, garbage out

It’s the evolution of machine intelligence that has made modern phones possible, and it’s the thing that underpins the most exciting developments for the future. One way to recognize AI, or artificial intelligence, is the erosion of the old truism of garbage in, garbage out. Machine learning algorithms are being developed to make cars smart enough to drive themselves; that will require AI capable of taking bad information, such as an obscured oncoming pedestrian, and making sense of it using further inputs and data.

The greatest change of the modern age is in the fact that we can now feed computers flawed information and they can filter out the impurities and errors. At least to a degree. You still can’t mash your fist against a touchscreen and expect Shakespearean prose to pour out the other end. But the thrilling thing is that, with contextual awareness constantly growing, maybe one day that’s exactly how we’ll communicate — with computers being smart enough to predict what people want to say and users simply selecting the most apt articulation of their message. That is already happening with Google’s Inbox and its Android messaging app, Allo, both of which exhibit a disquieting degree of accuracy in their guesses.

As we move forward, the amount of direct information we need to provide to a computer to get it to do something will diminishing to almost nothing. There’s no great magic to any of this; it’s just a matter of computers having so many inputs of data — both from ambient sources of information and historic learning they’ve accumulated over time – that any garbage we might throw their way is no longer enough to trip them up.