chrissie hynde with guitar and how it relates to the website design firm Sevell

How did a random moment on YouTube with Chrissie Hynde's "I'll Stand by You" wasted more time than we want to admit? It was that stinkin' artificial intelligence that sucked us in.

We were listening to one of our musical guilty pleasures on YouTube, "I'll Stand By You" by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, and we wasted a lot of time that afternoon going down the rabbit hole of old music, because YouTube kept throwing up recommendations of music we liked. And it kept us busy for a long time as you can see from the screen shot of our musical YouTube journey. (Yes, we even loved The Go-Gos and "Our Lips Are Sealed." Hey, we were young, and it was the 80s!)

We all know artificial intelligence has been making our lives easier for years. And it's always getting better... at wasting our time, as well as saving it. So maybe it all balances out. But as we read more about AI, we wondered...

Will artificial intelligence take our job?

We're not talking about the artificial intelligence that's been taking away manufacturing jobs for the last 10 years, and will be taking away more jobs, such as taxi drivers, truck drivers, and in the not-too-distant future, potentially lawyers.

There's already an hotel is Japan entirely staffed by robots, which you can see here.

Some futurists say most human jobs will be taken over by robots. One of the problems with that is it cuts down the tax base when there are more jobs being done by robots than people. Bill Gates suggests we tax the robot the same as the person whose job it takes. Seems like a good idea to us..

Hopefully website design is safe. For now.

Fortunately, according to Sophia Bernazzani, there's an 8.2% chance that graphic and web designers are fairly safe. The theory behind that is, design has to be fairly original, otherwise it's subject to intellectual copyright infringement. However, writers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence, which is somewhat disturbing.

AI for Google searches is called RankBrain

RankBrain is, essentially, artificial intelligence taking over what Google engineers have done developing algorithms to rank websites. Turns out, it does it as well, or slightly better than humans. For now. It won't be long before it does it much better than humans.

RankBrain is more than just keyword-matching. It takes the keywords you searching Google and turns them into concepts. So while it's no longer critical that you have the exact keywords in the exact order as someone's search on your page, we still use exact keyword matches when we can.

We saw an example of someone wanting to find a song by Scarlett Johansson, without using her name. Their voice search consisted of these search queries:

1. Who was in the movie Lost in Translation? (Google offered up Scarlett Johannson)

2. What song did she write? (Google offered up "Falling Down by Scarlett Johansson")

Yes, we're back to music.

So Google's RankBrain can help find a song for you without you even knowing the name of the artist or the name of the song. That, in a nutshell, is what Google RankBrain came conjure up by making connections through algorithms better then human engineers.

From our musical journey on YouTube:

screen_shot from youtube music video by Columbus website design firm Sevell