Don't Kid Yourself
Folks who don't know how AI models work often experience some combination of awe and creepiness when hearing about how these models can predict the future. But to paraphrase the great 1992 film Sneakers, “Don't kid yourself. It's not that [intelligent].”
Why? Because AI models are no smarter than the sum of their parts. At a simplistic level, you feed a supervised AI algorithm some historical data, purchases at Target for example, and you tell the algorithm, “Hey, these purchases were from pregnant people, and these other purchases were from not-so-pregnant people.” The algorithm munches on the data and out pops a model. In the future, you feed the model a customer's purchases and ask, “Is this person pregnant?” and the model answers, “No, that's a 26-year-old dude living in his mom's basement.”
That's extremely helpful, but the model isn't a magician. It just cleverly...