The Greatest Chance for Entrepreneurs: The Cognification of Everything

Artificial Intelligence? That’s evil might be your first thought. Artificial intelligence has been demonized by many Hollywood movies. From evil robots which are going to destroy humanity and surveillance states who will collect everything about their citizens.

But today we are at a point in time where we can decide on our own how the future with AI will look like. The first entrepreneurs and companies are still experimenting with AI. Other companies have already working AI products on the market.

AI is already a part of our lives

AI is already a part of our lives. Whether we ask Siri for information or Google for the traffic situation, the technology behind it is backed with AI. The fact is that products with AI capabilities will only increase from today on. There are many products which are called smart but they are everything else that smart. Would you call a smart TV smart? Of course not. The same is true for smart homes. Being connected to the internet does not make products smart. That’s where entrepreneurs and innovative companies have to attack the future.

The task for entrepreneurs will be to make products and services smart. We have to apply the term smart to every electronic product we know. Entrepreneurs will come up with smartbooks, smartphones, smart computers, smart fridges, smart cars, and even smart homes, smart roads, smart offices, and smart industries.

The Cognification of Everything

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive idiot of Wired magazine, calls the process of making things smart “cognifying”.
So entrepreneurs will cognify every electronic product which will create our future. Kevin Kelly says that everything which has been electrified will be cognified.

A good example is a car. Right now we have cars with 100 horsepowers. By simply turning the car keys we have the power of 100 horses available by pressing our foot to the gas pedal. This allows you to drive the car with 100km/h or even 200km/h. But you still have to drive the car on your own. The cognification of cars is already taking place. Many car manufacturers, plus Google, Apple, and Uber are researching and testing self-driving cars. They simply added 100 artificial minds to the car. The result will be cars which bring us to our destinations on their own with a significantly lower risk of fatal accidents.

We as entrepreneurs can now take the principle of cognification and apply it to nearly everything:

• Coffee machines
• Cars
• Computers
• Books
• Smartphones
• Glasses
• Gaming
• (Aero)planes
• Ships
• Bikes
• Doors
• Thermostats
• Windows

and everything else you can think of.

Our next steps as Entrepreneurs

And the best way entrepreneurs and companies can do this is by creating many different AI’s. Instead of relying on one single provider of AI (examples would be IBM’s Watson or Google’s Deep Mind) we need to ensure that we have billions or trillions of different artificial minds. So instead of simply using the API’s of Google or IBM, inventors and entrepreneurs have to develop their own AI. This will create a balance of intelligence to ensure that no evil AI will ever destroy our humanity. However, today in 2017 the future shines very bright and we have endless possibilities to enhance the world by building a friendly AI. Let’s take this chance and create a better world for everyone. So that one day our grandchildren will say: “Oh my god how did you live without AI for such a long time?”.