When I was at the Complex Systems Conference in Singapore in September 2019, I found myself musing on the question: in a world where we have all maxed out our use of AI, how will that change the way that a business outcompetes their rivals? In a world where automated decision-making will take over more and more of the running of businesses and entire countries how do you compete to win? The conclusion I came to was that it was about out-thinking and out-manouevring your rivals and adversaries to the extent that you shape the environment in which you are competing in a way that your adversaries (humans and AI) can no longer accurately comprehend it and, thus, would begin to make increasingly bad decisions.

Now, this has happened throughout history and to quote Sun Tzu “… the whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent”. However, the key difference this time is that AI will have a significant role in shaping that competed environment at a speed and a propensity for handling big data that humans are simply left behind. We may enter a cognitive war of AI versus AI.

I am hypothesising that AI will come to dominate global action that shapes our offline and online worlds. So, if you want to compete you will need to shape the digital environment that AI is attempting to predict, understand and act in. In other words, the competitive moves we make in the future will (a) be done automatically by AI on our behalf, and (b) therefore we will need to consider how AI will perceive our actions (recognising that, for the moment at least, most AI is dependent on big data). If the long-established practice of marketing to convince people to buy your product is extended to marketing to artificial intellects too, to persuade an AI to behave in a way that you want it to, then you start to get the point.

I call this having a cognitive advantage which I define as:

the demonstrable superiority gained through comprehending and acting to shape a competitive environment at a pace and with an ingenuity that an adversary’s ability to comprehend and act is compromised

I wrote a paper about this last year:

I will also be giving a talk on Cognitive Advantage at this year’s Future of Information & Communication conference in Vancouver (FICC 2021). A version of the conference paper will also be published in Springer’s ‘Advances in Intelligent Systems’.

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