Endeit’s outlook on Intelligent Empowerment

by Hubert Deitmers, Managing Partner of Endeit Capital

In a recent blog I’ve shared with you that Endeit Capital has become founding partner of AI.nl, a new Dutch platform for the Intelligent Empowerment community. After the launch of this new platform, it’s time to share you more about our outlook at Endeit Capital on Intelligent Empowerment technologies.

Shift happens

With Intelligent Empowerment, the next big wave of technology disruption has still to come. Since the nineties, we have been confronted with several waves of digital disruption. The dotcom wave first confronted us with websites, email, and e-commerce services. After the bursting dotcom bubble, the interactive and social internet, also known as Web 2.0, emerged around 2002. Principles such as the longtail and platforms such as social media and crowdsourcing emerged during this period. Right now, we are in a wave of Hyper scaling. Technologies and business models that enable high scalability are leading the third wave of digital transformation such as big data, cloud computing and SaaS. In 3-7 years from now we expect the fourth wave of digital disruption to take place; the powerful combination of AI, deep learning, quantum computing and democratized algorithms.

The faces of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has many faces, which also change over the years. In my Atlas Venture days in the late eighties, we were already looking at numerous AI developments out of our Boston office. Certain tasks considered as AI in the past, have become routine ever since. Its adoption has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. But now we have reached a tipping point and the combination of AI, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning and Deep Learning will cause a perfect storm somewhere in the (near) future. This will create endless opportunities. From an ethical point of view, we should look at possibilities to complement and empower people instead of making them redundant.

Impact of AI on humans

As Israelian historian Yuval Noah Harari describes in his latest book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” the use of Artificial Intelligence will have a big impact on the lives of humans in the coming years. As we develop a better understanding of human emotions, desires and choices, computers will become more versatile in workplaces. Human tasks which are primarily based on pattern recognition or perception are ripe for AI solutions. General practitioners for example will be replaced with AI-doctors since their very standardized way of work. Those professionals who are willing to cooperate with AI will be the ones who flourish in future workplaces. Harari concludes in his book that the future is bright. We should not be worried about AI’s potential in the workplace and instead, see it as an opportunity. We should look at possibilities to complement and empower people instead of making them redundant. AI can help us move away from the mundane tasks people don’t want to do and allow us to spend more time improving society.

Embracing Intelligent Empowerment

As Europe, if we want to play an important role in the next decades, we must embrace these rapidly emerging Intelligent Empowerment technologies. In the next few years, the winners (and losers) of AI and all those Intelligent Empowerment technologies will be determined. The first movers will reap the benefits. It’s a big responsibility for us all to contribute to that.

At Endeit Capital stimulating and empowering entrepreneurship is at the core of what we do and so we are investing and supporting entrepreneurs building successful companies using Intelligent Empowerment technologies. In my next blog I will share some examples of our portfolio companies and how they apply Intelligent Empowerment technologies successfully in their businesses.

Endeit Capital is founding partner of AI.nl, publishing about the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.