My favorite analytics Guru returns to highlight in the current podcast episode some of the benefits of analytics and why we as humans don’t need to fear artificial intelligence both in our lives and in busness.
I caught up with Dr Morten Middelfart as usual in the thick of things, so we had to do our chat phone to phone which took me a little time to get my sound levels right. It was well worth it because he did not disappoint. Since our last chat he has been busy forming an analytics company Social Quant while working with Genomic Expression on the cutting edge of using analytics in cancer research.
Right off the bat he explains why analytics is the new buzz word, because it has worked its way into our everyday lives. As he puts it “Because we trust Google to give us good search results or Netflix when it makes a recommendation of what movie to watch.” Analytics shape our lives and for the most part we don’t seem to recognize it as algorithms that provides these choices.
More than anything the research he is involved in with RNA (he calls it the software of DNA) using big data to help determine medical applications in the treatment 
of cancer is both exciting and amazing. It is exciting because if successful it offers great promise in the treatment of cancer, amazing because it focuses on treating cancer at the cell level which can be much more targeted.
I love having Dr. Marten on as a guest because he comes armed with great ideas while being able to explain them in a manner that the average person can understand. I’m always prepared for him to provide a different perspective than you might get from reading the newspaper or around the water cooler. AND, for a scientist, he is just plain fun. On the different perspective side, he says man has little to fear from algorithms and artificial intelligence. Just the ability to analyze large amounts of data that we were previously unable to do will provide insights we could never have imagined. Along with that comes the freeing up of time and energy previously used to perform tasks that wore down bodies or were mind numbingly repetitious. In his mind man holds the advantage over the machine because we are able to quickly adapt to situations and machines are not. Take that Watson!
Whole new business models will be developed around analytics for use in areas as different as medicine, recreation, and customer service. It is almost like being around at the beginning of the industrial age when people left farms to go work in cities. Yes, it will require some adaptation, but that is what man is great at. Dr. Morten can explain it a lot better than I can so by all means give the podcast episode a listen. You will come away a lot more informed and full of hope for the future.
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