4 College of Business and Economics | Annual Report 2018 Overview The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) frames the impact of technological advances on humanity. Unpacking this impact reveals a tangled mass of connections, which even the architects of artificial intelligence (AI) battle to fully understand. The manner in which AI processes data generated from billions of searches on the World Wide Web in the so-called ‘black box’ remains mysterious. Of interest is that the search engine Google, head-quartered in the USA, is blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall. In China, the top search engine is Baidu, an equally powerful global AI and Internet company. What these competitors have in common, is that their search results are being kept notoriously secret. On the face of it, humans are not in control of this new, scary world. This poses a typical wicked problem in the sense of being difficult to resolve, because knowledge is either incomplete or contradictory, a huge number of people and opinions are involved, and it carries a large economic burden involving many interconnected problems. To develop critical thinkers and problem solvers who address business, economic and societal challenges. PROF DANEEL VAN LILL Executive Dean – College of Business and Economics
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