Gigaom AI Minute – May 1

Transcript

We recently surveyed Gigaom's audience about their views on artificial intelligence. Our audience is primarily made up of business people that have an interest in technology, and I would like to use the next several AI minutes to explore the answers.

The first question we asked people was straight forward: Are you an optimist, a pessimist or is it complicated?

Surprisingly 80% of the people said they were optimists, only 5% self-identified as pessimists, with 15% saying "it's complicated." Now even if you take that 15% percent and move them all over into the pessimist camp, you are still left with 4 optimists for every pessimist or pessimist leaning person. This surprised me because it is so out of step with the daily narrative in the prevailing news, that people who are close to technology and in business are broadly speaking worried about it, but it turns out that the vast majority say unabashedly I'm an optimist.