Mike Pell: “AI will know how we want to experience information”
AI will change completely the way we consume information — that’s what Mike Pell talked about at Rockets & Unicorns. He leads the design for The Microsoft Garage, the company’s worldwide innovation program.
Interview: Katharina Mau
How can artificial intelligence help journalists?
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and reinforcement learning will help both on the offering side to generate content from a single source and on the consumption side being able to take a single piece of content and consume it at different levels. The AI will actually know how we want to experience this information. If you’re walking on the street, you want to get information through your earbud, if you are inside, you see it on a larger screen. If you’re at work, you get it on your laptop or being projected into your mixed reality headset. We have to be able to have information that can be consumed in those different ways without having to offer it that way every single time. In journalism you want to go quick. You don’t want to generate the same piece of content multiple ways, it’s too time consuming. So AI can help us.
How does this work?
Right now, AI can help you pick out the keywords and write a summary just from what you’ve written. We have algorithms that are getting quite good at this. The opposite is also true: In your article, you reference people and places and things and the algorithms can actually go look up all those things and crosslink them. All these things exist today.
They exist in pieces. When will we have solutions that put all this together?
During the age of smart information. Within the next several years we will see things starting to come together.
How does AI know when I want to consume my information in which way?
Let’s take the iPhone as an example. The iPhone knows where I left my car and it tells me. I didn’t ask my phone to do that. Artificial intelligence was baked into the iPhone’s operating system in order to provide that value to people. That’s how AI is already being infused in our every day life.
Do you think journalism falls behind because publishers don’t invest enough in these fields?
Journalism is about to buckle under its own weight. It can’t keep operating in its old model, it has to reinvent itself. Just putting up a website is not gonna do it. We have to use the machine for what it’s good for. To be able to create multiple forms of stories that come from reputable authors. People are craving the high quality news, the high quality journalism. I think that journalism as an industry will realize that there is a ton to be leveraged right in these new technologies to make the experience of the people better
