Will machines take over the fashion industry?

“No area of life or business will be insulated from AI, in the same way that no part of society hasn't been touched by the Internet.” – Chris Dixon, partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz

Slowly but surely artificial intelligence has been creeping its way into our daily lives, impacting industries like Law, Tech and Sports Journalism among many.  We have discussed how artificial intelligence can help businesses scale personal services, build better products, and optimize efficiency. The question remains whether or not the fashion industry is prepared for the AI revolution, and in which ways this specific domain will be able to harness the benefits of the rapidly growing trend.

Think of the last time you bought something online, what was that experience like? You probably identified the desired website, scrolled through their clothing selection in hopes of finding the apparel that fit your price, size and design criteria. These interactions not only took time, but they also didn’t guarantee full satisfaction. What would happen if online shopping became a conversation instead? Shoppers could describe their ideal jeans or dress of their dreams, and in the matter of seconds, an AI search engine would match their criteria to the closest matches – think of it as your personal AI shopping assistant.

In the last few years we’ve seen an increase in buzz words like machine learning, neural networks, big data and algorithm matching. The computing devices that we use on a daily basis have the capacity to generate an enormous amount of data sets, which are ultimately analyzed, by deep learning algorithms, in order to predict trends and identify patterns. With machine learning processes, the more data introduced within the system, the faster and “better” the machine learns to effectively perform its task. Under this assumption, the fashion industry will be able to make use of machine learning and the big data sets collected in order to predict trends and tend to consumer behaviors.

The future of retail is just around the corner if AI manages to deliver scalable and original one-to-one online shopping experiences. In fact, various fashion houses have turned to technology and AI to offer their customers more personalized and customizable services. ASAP54, dubbed the “Shazam for fashion” uses AI and image recognition to build search engines for fashion. ASAP54 users can snap a picture of someone on the street wearing an outfit they like, and the application will be able to search through a huge database of purchasable products in order to generate the closest matches to the uploaded item. Similarly, Thread, an online personal styling service, partners eight human personal stylists with machine learning algorithms that crawl through more than31 million customer-submitted ratings, and over 4 trillion item combinations in order to recommend outfits to their customers.

AI’s ability to manage, analyze and remember a vast amount of data allows it to scale up fast. The fashion industry would do good to jump on the AI train while is hot, revolutionizing the way they do business, as well as the way customers interact with fashion.  

This past May 2016, IBM Watson joined forces with Fashion magnate house Marchesa to design a unique “cognitive dress” for this year’s Met Gala theme on Manus x Machina: fashion inan Age of Technology . The unique dress was data-driven, embedded with LED lights that allowed it to change colors in real time depending on the social media mood of users commenting through the gala’s Twitter feed. Amazingly enough, the dress used the same kind of cognitive tools that Watson has applied when famously beating the human champion of quiz show"Jeopardy". If you want to learn more about how the dress relies on cognitive APIs and inputs in order to incorporate technology and fashion, make sure to read this article, and watch the video below.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Can AI benefit humanity as a whole?

While tech companies have been overpromising on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications would affect our daily lives for the past decade or so, it seems we have gotten to a point, where those science-fiction dream smart machines will soon be a reality. Algorithms and machine learning processes  get more advanced, larger and larger data sets become available, and processing power becomes more cost efficient. The result – autonomous cars, drones, augmented and virtual reality, robots, and many more.

No doubt about it: AI will have a significant impact on our future. But who will be involved in shaping that impact? When it comes to AI there are countless ethical, social moral and economic questions to be answered but who will answer them? What ethical code will a smart machine follow when it makes autonomous decisions? How to deal with a potential mass dislocation of labor when machine learning becomes sufficiently advanced? Will AI be used in warfare?

According to an article by John Markoff in the New York times some of the world’s largest and most prominent tech companies have started discussing the impact of AI on society and our world. These discussions are being led to ensure that AI research and development benefits humanity, rather than harm it. But IBM, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are companies with agendas and a need to generate financial return. So while their effort is admirable, the industry alone should not be the only one setting a framework of regulations for AI development. It’s not new that policymakers and regulators lag technology. Governments will have to catch up soon and set their own regulations (Thank you Mr. President). There is another approach that goes beyond industry and politics, shaping our future with intelligent machines:

OpenAI is a non-profit organization that promotes the decentralization and democratization of AI research. The organization is funded by entrepreneur Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Altman and Musk think that AI is the most important technology that will most affect humanity’s future. Yet they are very outspoken that AI bears the potential to be an existential risk to society. By decentralizing, distributing and democratizing research into AI, Altman and Musk hope to prevent humanity’s destruction by an uncontrollable AI or a super intelligence in the hands of a small group of people who use it for their personal profit and gain. You say these thoughts sound a lot like the Terminator movies and their occurrence is unlikely? Maybe, but the democratization of research could also democratize the answering of all those complex questions related to the matter.

An apple a day keeps the computer away: could a robot diagnose diseases?

In the previous articles, we have already seen many trends involving artificial intelligence and their possible future applications: the way it may affect car companies and how could law firms benefit from this new technology. But what kind of improvements could a robot bring to the medical scene? Would you trust a robot when it comes to your personal health?

In 2010 IBM developed the first artificial intelligence that understands and answers to questions in natural language and uses machine learning to analyse unstructured data. Watson, the name of this technology, is able to quickly extract information from all kinds of documents and reveal insights, patterns and relationships across data. 

In its first application, Watson competed on Jeopardy! with its previous winners, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, and won the first price of $1 million. This was just a test to prove its capability of answering natural language questions…and of course it was a success!

After this trial, IBM started improving Watson’s capabilities and, at the moment, it has found several applications in law, finance and retail fields. It is also currently used in fantasy football in the US’ NFL! 

However, the main field in which Watson is currently working on is healthcare. With its cognitive system, it is able to analyse, understand, reason and learn data at a speed that humans could never reach.

Healthcare data doubles every 24 months and doctors do not have the possibility to keep up with these new insights. Watson is able to read 200 million pages in 3 seconds and understand unstructured data, something that current systems can’t do. It is able to diagnose a disease just by analysing the medical reports and comparing them with the new findings in the medical field.

Starting from 2011, several US clinics collaborated with IBM to utilize Watson to suggest treatments options for their patients. Since February 2013, it started collaborating with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on lung cancer treatment, and following this example many other oncological centers decided to use this artificial intelligence to improve the decision making process and to fasten diagnoses.

IBM itself, to promote Watson capabilities, decided to launch a program within the company to help its employees fighting cancer, in collaboration with “Best Doctors”, a clinical consultation provider.

As we have already mentioned, Watson has analytical capabilities that humans or current systems cannot reply in any way. It can suggest a diagnostic for a disease and leave the doctors to deal with the patient without wasting time in keeping up with the new medical findings.

This is going to be one of the most disruptive innovations for this field, but may also bring about new ethical questions. Would you let a robot diagnose your disease and indirectly decide the best possible treatment for your health? Will the position of a traditional doctor become obsolete in the following years?