Episode 970 – Man vs Machine – A Brief History of Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence

The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

Back in 1997, Deep Blue (an IBM computer) defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion at the time, in a six-game match with a final score of 3.5-2.5 in favor of Deep Blue. Almost 20 years later, in 2016, Google's AlphaGo program achieved a similar victory by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the world's top professional Go players, in a five-game match with a final score of 4-1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been around for decades, yet they were not accessible to you and me. Now that they are, they're predicted to change marketing (and life in general) forever. Experts, insiders, and reporters expect good and bad from AI. Some predict Skynet from the Terminator movies, while others expect it to cure cancer. Ockham's razor would predict that it's probably something in the middle. Companies and their leaders are telling us that they are working to make your experience better and part of the greater good of humanity. Search is supposed to provide the best answer to your search prompt, and social media is supposed to serve the content you want to see. In reality, it's more about profits than principles. Search is optimized to get you to click ads—that's how Google makes over 75% of its revenue. Facebook feeds your friendships and shows posts meant to stir the pot and keep you engaged. Facebook makes over 95% of its profits from ad sales. Ockham's razor would show us that trying to find and win customers through search and social media would benefit the platform more than you. It's like a casino with all that noise of winners on its machines, but the odds have been programmed to make the casino much more money than it's paying out! When it comes to marketing, we have been using AI since the beginnings of Google and Facebook. Both are run through algorithms.