Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of February 5, 2019

Article Excerpt

Artificial intelligence (AI) is essentially the merging of today’s big computing with big data. This has resulted in breakthroughs in everything from creating machines that can recognize faces with more accuracy than a human, to building cars capable of driving themselves. The concept fascinates a lot of people, especially investors. They visualize AI-equipped machines that will be able to, for example, carry on intelligent conversations without revealing they are less than human. No doubt AI will have great impact on our lives as time passes. But we think many people today overestimate the investor potential of AI technology. Computers beat humans at games like chess because computers are inherently digital, and so is chess—there’s no better word. In a chess game, only a relative handful of moves exist at any one time. After each move, new possibilities come to light, but they all follow the same basic rules. AI has an advantage over human intelligence in chess, because it has the data storage…