There is a lot of noise around new computational technologies that claim to simulate human thought processes in new ways. From machine learning to neural networks to Large Action Models (LAMs) and more, it is easy to get lost in the smoke and mirrors of the minutiae of these technologies, their capabilities and their supposed impacts.
Putting them in a bag of ‘Cognitive Technologies’ is a way of stepping out of the billowy smoke, and having useful conversations about their general aspects, general promise and general implications.
‘Cognitive Transformation’ is the topic of how we will migrate our businesses from the current generation of logic driven technologies, i.e. digital.
What are the barriers to that transition? The easy ones are
- the efforts to regulate and constrain these technologies before they are even functional and deployable
- the capital expenditure in bringing in new technologies before the costs of the old have been amortised (i.e. there is still unpaid technical debt)
- the potential economic disruption of displaced workers
Other impediments may be less obvious
Customer contracts today are based on precise accuracy based on fixed software systems, e.g. consumer banking payments.
These contracts may need rethinking for systems based on neural AI that use data training and adaption to data flowing through them as they process. Responses from such systems may therefore vary very quickly and thus a best intentional service is implied.
Regulation is conflated with regional or even national innovation, data, social and taxation ideologies.
Startups may find that they need to migrate to more innovation friendly regions. Organisations may compete with others using technologies operating from or developed in regions or countries from with different ideologies.
There is a massive investment in workforce skills and technologies in digital organisations.
Some of these are more than technological enablers, they are core to the products and services they offer, e.g. software development. How do they migrate their business model when they face potential annihilation?
Where can I learn more about Cognitive Transformation and Imperial College London?
Our event in June 2025 is a place is a place to discuss issues of the order of those above with peers across industries and from experts working on cognitive technologies today. The experts are not just refining tools in research labs, but have tacit, undocumented understanding of the implications, including feedback from real-life scenarios across a range of businesses and sectors.
But what about the future of Cognitive Transformation?
You may be wondering what might come next beyond these technologies? As you may have gathered from our work at Imperial Tech Foresight, plotting out plausible futures is our speciality.
Emulating human thought in tools is as old as humanity itself. Our current, and perhaps soon to be past, digital technologies are shoulders upon which the new cognitive ones have been built. These in turn will be superseded. For example, the nascent digital-to-analogue Brain Computer Interfaces relying on fine neuronal connections may be challenged by replacement with Quantum Entangled brains and computers.
All of this and more besides is on the agenda for our event in June, as well as our ongoing work with clients around the world, as well as at the forefront of many of our experts’ own areas of interest and research.
Be sure to join us on Wednesday 4 June to discover more about Cognitive Transformation.