This Beer Evolves According to Artificial Intelligence

Imagine a world where you could buy a beer that was brewed by artificial intelligence, served by a robot bartender, and enjoyed in the company of robotic drinking buddies. It might sound like science fiction, but there is a growing army of boozy bots who are making that very scenario a reality.

London startup IntelligentX has created a beer that uses "complex machine learning algorithms" to modify and improve the initial recipe based on consumer feedback.

In what is being called the "first beer brewed by artificial intelligence," IntelligentX hopes to create products which are constantly evolving by bringing their entire client base and expert brewers together via its Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI, pronounced "Abbey") algorithm.

IntelligentX currently offers four products; a classic British golden ale, a bitter with notes of grapefruit, an American pale ale, and a Marmite beer. By collecting feedback about their beers, ABI can adapt each recipe in accordance with the consumer's notes and the intuition of their brewers, whose intuition, they claim, has been encoded into the ABI algorithm.

The extent to which human intuition can be quantified or encoded remains to be seen, but one thing remains certain; if the IntelligentX app catches on, no two brews will ever taste the same. "Once our beer is out in the world, our AI, ABI, can have a conversation with all our customers and that gives us the feedback that allows our beer to evolve," press release. "We can brew beer that matches what you want, more quickly than anyone else can. That means we get more data and you get a better, fresher beer."

Those "conversations" take place with a messenger-type app in smartphones, which means that the data can be collected in real time. But does this mean human brewers will just become cogs in the wheel of an AI machine? Not so, says IntelligentX.

"Contrary to popular belief, we don't believe AI is going to take everyone's jobs," company founders told Huffington Post. "We believe the future is a place where AI augments humans' skills. In this case we're using AI to give our brewer superhuman skills, enabling them to test and receive feedback on our beer more quickly than ever before. This means we can respond to consumers' changing tastes faster than traditional brewers."

But what if the machines become self-aware? Will they, too, become beer snobs, or take it upon themselves to sneak more hops into the algorithm? These questions may seem a little alarmist, but we may be forced to answer them in the not-do-distant future of booze bots.