Quiz of IT and Data Analytics Professionals Reveals a Wide Gap Between Interest in AI and Understanding of Fundamental Principles
April 25, 2019 Edison, NJ – Orion Business Innovation (“Orion”), a fast-growing firm focused on digital transformation and a global player in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, released the results of its recent survey aimed at testing the industry’s understanding of AI, its context and history. While artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword of the moment with everyone talking about the attributes and a future powered by AI, Orion’s quiz revealed that enthusiasm for AI exceeds knowledge of its origins and fundamental mathematical constructs.
The AI quiz, which was completed by 618 IT and data analytics professionals, found that just 2 percent of respondents – a total of 12 people – got nine or 10 questions correct. The implication is that there’s great interest in AI without great knowledge about artificial intelligence.
“It’s not too surprising that the attention to AI outweighs broad understanding of its origins and principles,” Raj Patil, Orion CEO, observed. “AI appears to be a shiny new object. The reality is that AI is a body of mathematical and operational principles that have evolved over more than 60 years. AI has become more powerful by the confluence of inexpensive big data storage, large data sets, accelerated computing speeds and machine learning algorithms. We hope that the results of this simple quiz will inspire more people to learn more about AI.”
Answers Reveal Knowledge Gaps
The results further demonstrated the gap in background knowledge with almost half of respondents (49.6%) answering five or less questions correctly. A few key highlights of the results include:
- What does the Church Turning thesis say? 43% answered correctly with computers can simulate formal reasoning while 20% believed it was that computers can mirror human behavior
- An intelligent agent ‘perceives its environment and takes action’, which 37% of respondents answered correctly, while 29% believed that it ‘finds its own pathways’.
- Which element is not an AI learner? 43% answered correctly with ‘fitness function’ while ‘decision tree’ and ‘nearest neighbor’ both received 15% of the votes
- Morovec’s Paradox is defined as the notion that simple human skills are the most difficult to program, which 46% of respondents answered correctly. Twenty-four percent believed it was ‘the simplest answer is usually the right one’.
About Orion
Headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, Orion is uniquely positioned as a high touch, high quality and nimble solutions provider with the proven expertise and scale to solve complex problems of Fortune 1,000 customers. Orion provides digital transformation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics and automation services to large enterprise customers across the financial and professional services, communications and media, professional sports and entertainment, education and healthcare industries. For more information, visit www.orioninc.com.
Media Contact:
Joe LoBello