*.intelligence

So whatever we may call the larger *.intelligence movement (heaven forbid, humans actually measuring up to their claim of being the most intelligent species around? <chuckle>) ...

I am neither working for a spy agency, nor would I ever dare to claim to be in the know of it all. I also don't have scientific credentials. My judgment is largely casual observation / intuition / experienced based.

But that's the whole point. As an individual, humans tend to be notoriously ambiguous in their perception, and often off in their resulting judgment (due to the emotion component).

Yet, just as George Soros stated in  "The Alchemy of Finance", human emotions are relevant to consider because they are causes for downstream effects, which in turn affect other emotions (Soros called it "reciprocal" relationship).

So emotional judgment is real, and important to consider. You take the individual opinion, impulse if you will, and connect it on a massive scale (in a reciprocal fashion), and you get emergent behavior (that's from chaos theory: large crowd of agents with conscious individual activity, responding to its surrounding, mutually influential).

I am not the first one to link Artificial Intelligence to Analytics and Business Intelligence. But often I ponder in my day job about how we are doing reporting pretty much the same way like in the mainframe days, based on the turnaround cycles, except that now the reports are graphic instead of green/white-lined all-caps lines of letters. And I wonder whatever happened to the concept of computers automating and speeding up information processing & presentation.

So yes, a bit more agility, the wait times aren't 3 months anymore, but as the Twitter-based infographics from Egypt showed (within few days after the happenings), it is possible to provide impressive intelligence about a complex situation in a digestible format, in very short time. And Twitter wasn't even specifically set up to measure such things, it was more of a side effect, having a simple event based system with a very compact data model (author, hashtags, message, temporal sequence) used on such a broad, yes global, scale.

I hear the groans...."but you can't use stuff like this for financial reporting!"
Why not? I've seen many projects where, after lots of effort, they still struggled to reconcile the numbers and explained discrepancies away with system/business constraints. As 2008 has proven, (human-driven) financial accounting and controlling isn't all that it's shaped up to be, in terms of accuracy and dilligence.

If you have enough autonomous agents, automated of course, via computer software, roam your corporate environment, listening in to your transactions etc. they should arrive at least at the same accuracy as human effort does today, with less effort, and probably in a more traceable (i.e. accountable) way.

Isn't that what they invented computers for to begin with?
They are counting faster and more reliably than humans.

Food for thought...