A little while back Frank Levy, an MIT economist whose work I’ve drawn on a lot, and Seth Teller and John Leonard of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) came to an important realization: MIT is home to both a set of people exploring the economic implications of cutting-edge technologies like AI, and many of the top AI researchers themselves. So shouldn’t these two groups come together, get acquainted, and start swapping ideas?

We did so over lunch last Thursday at CSAIL. Because we didn’t discuss blogging groundrules I’ll not disclose the attendees here, except to note that my Race Against the Machine coauthor Erik Brynjolfsson was there. The conversation flowed freely for an hour and a half, and none of us felt like we’d come anywhere close to exhausting the topic, so we’ll do it again.

I left with a full brain, the lingering sense that I was the dumbest guy in the room, and a few clear learnings and impressions. The latter include:

• The discipline of AI was Big Data before Big Data was cool. As the CSAIL researchers explained, the field of AI pivoted substantially starting in the late 80s and early 90s. Prior to that time, we were trying to teach computers rules: how language worked, how knowledge was organized, how the universe was structured. After then, we just filled them up with data and put statistical algorithms on top of them: If you see this waveform, it’s this word or this sentence; if you see this string of words in one language, it corresponds to this string in this other language; etc. This approach has only gained currency as the amount of digital data in the world continues to mushroom. (here and elsewhere I’m going to oversimplify the field of AI badly, and get important details wrong because of ignorance and/or a need for brevity. Apologies.)
• AI algorithms get better as data gets bigger. Super large datasets let researchers test their hypotheses and ideas, finding out which ones actually work. This lets the self-improving and auto-correcting features of science kick in in a way they never could when the AI debates had to remain in the realm of pure theory.
• We don’t need to worry about the Terminator or prepare for the Singularity. Computers are getting bigger and faster, but not ‘smarter’ in any human sense of the word. Artificial intelligence bears very little relationship to the human variety, and the two are not going to merge. One of the AI researchers referred to the idea of the Singularity as a ‘category mistake,’ which is a great academic insult.
• Faith in human intuition remains strong. Too strong. One of my biggest surprises came as I listened to the AI researchers defend human decision-making and pattern-matching capabilities. As I’ve said repeatedly (0 Comments and 0 Reactions, here, and here, for starters), I think our intuition, while amazing and real, is also highly overrated —  clearly glitchy and biased — and should be replaced by algorithmic approaches as soon as it’s clear that the algorithms to a better job. Costs will drop and outcomes will improve as we get humans out of the loop in more and more circumstances. I found it very strange to be working to convince a bunch of world-class algorithmicists of the comparative advantages of algorithms, but I guess I should be used to it by now. Most people, including professional technologists, are enamored of intuition.
• Nobody knows where we’re headed. When one of the AI guys walked into the room with a copy of our book, my first thought was not “Wow, that’s flattering.” It was “Uh-oh — does he expect us to tell him how the future’s going to unfold? ‘Cause that’s what I was hoping to learn from him…” I’m very sure that the economic and societal consequences of recent astonishing technical progress are going to be big, and I’m not at all sure what they are. Technology-fueled capitalist creative destruction is a messy and uneven process, and its twists and turns in coming years will leave us amazed.

I’m a huge optimist about this process overall (although I’m deeply concerned about some of the labor force implications; hence Race Against…) and I very much look forward to future conversations with leading technologists to help me understand it better. Erik and I are headed to San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the end of the month to continue these conversations. I’ll be sure to report back from there…

This post first appeared in my blog, The Business Impact of IT, May 7.

The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium announced four finalists for the 2012 Award for Innovation Leadership. The winner will be announced at the Symposium on May 22.

The award honors Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who pursue innovative use of Information Technology (IT) and business processes to deliver business value.The Symposium released biographies of the finalists as follows:

• Chris Perretta, EVP and CIO, State Street Corp. He has global responsibility for all of State Street's IT activities; leading a team of over 5,000 employees and contractors supporting operations in 27 countries, covering all major investment centers. He oversees the IT strategic planning process, application development and maintenance, system architecture, global technology infrastructure, and information security for the firm. In addition, Chris co-leads the company's Operations and Information Technology Transformation Program.

• Bill Oates is the CIO for the City of Boston where he is charged with spearheading technology initiatives and the delivery of IT services in support of the various city functions. Under hisleadership, the Boston has been recognized as a leader in leveraging technology to improve citizen engagement and access to services. In 2011, Bill was recognized as one of the "Top 25 Public Sector Innovators" by Government Technology Magazine and was recently named the New England CIO Innovation Award winner by Mass High Tech. He was named to the Cabinet level position by Boston's Mayor Thomas M. Menino in June of 2006.

• Susan Cooklin, CIO of Network Rail in the U.K., leads activities that underpin a large and complex technology portfolio focused on reducing the cost of running the railway by 21% by 2014. She takes a fresh, bold, and innovative approach to leadership and deliver that puts technology at the heart of the business operation and harnesses talent. As a result, projects like the Train Graph application have been deployed quickly and effectively with a positive impact for colleagues, customers and business profitability. Susanis passionate about using innovative technology to drive increased business performance and was recently asked to join the board of Leeds Metropolitan University as a Non-Executive Director.

• Catherine Bruno is the VP and CIO at Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (EMHS) where she has successfully developed Information Systems Strategic Plans and Governance designs at three large, complex healthcare organizations. Catherine has implemented and integrated major clinical, financial, and decision-support information systems, two of which received the nation's highest award for implementation of a system-wide Electronic Health Record, by the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS). She is the Executive Sponsor for the Bangor Beacon Community, one of 17 communities in the U.S. to receive a $12.75 million grant to improve the health of the people in the Bangor community through care management supported by Health IT and was asked by the Office of the National Coordinator to co-chair the Leadership and Governance Community of Practice for the national Beacon program.

There's still time to register for the Symposium and meet these executives as well as others--and to find out who the award winner will be.

For more information visit: www.mitcio.com