“ AI and AGI certainly produce cultural change”. A talk with Stewart Rogers, VentureBeat

Anna Pozniak
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

This summer I attented Future in the City conference in Moscow. That’s where I heard Stewart Rogers talking about AI. I enjoyed the talk so much I decided to continue the conversation. So I approached Stewart with a bunch of questions following up his talk and he answered! Here’s an interview that came out:

Stewart Rogers, image source: mmr.ua

What do you think influences the way general audience understands AI today?

Most people don’t understand AI, because their perception is warped from years of Hollywood movies and sci-fi books. They confuse it with Artificial General Intelligence, whereas AI is already affecting our daily lives — from Netflix recommendations to personalized mobile ads.

There is a point that technological development today outruns our ability to understand and analyze it. Do you think we have enough time to understand what’s good and what’s bad for us?

Who is to say what is good and what is bad? What we do know is that, despite the speed of technological advancement, any technology that causes a cultural change still takes at least a generation to become mainstream. So we have time because AI and AGI certainly produce cultural change.

To advance machine learning and artificial intelligence we need more open data. When do you think more open data sets will be available?

There are teams already working on this. Google leads the AI field not because it has excellent algorithms, but because it has access to all the data. SingularityNET is working on a blockchain-powered repository for AI and data that is effectively the “GitHub of AI.” I don’t think we’ll need to wait long before databases the size of Google’s are available to everyone.

The global cognitive computing market is expected to reach $12.5 billion in 2019, up from $2.5billion in 2014, at a CAGR of 38%. Could you bring out some perspectives and trends in the field?

The biggest trend right now is the speed with which AI processors are improving. Moore’s Law is being blown away, with Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that are 500% faster than the previous generation. Google claims the each second-generation TPU can deliver up to 180 teraflops of performance, and that will accelerate the interest in producing cognitive computing products and services, aiding market growth.

Why do you think the term AI made people feel nervous? Was the media part of it?

Yes, totally. And the likes of Elon Musk don’t help either. While Musk may have some good points to make about AGI, it is a little strange to be publicly calling AI “evil and “dangerous” while simultaneously developing AI solutions in the background. None of these knee-jerk reactions to AI are helping the public understand it and come to terms with it.

Did replacing the term “AI” with “machine learning” helped in changing the tone of the conversation?

For a short while, yes, but then the community became confused as to the difference between ML and AI, and how best to describe them to a non-technical audience. Machine learning as a term has become synonymous with AI, and while it doesn’t carry the same emotional weight, it doesn’t look like the public is really “getting it.”

Among the wrong questions to ask about AI you mentioned the following: Is AI friend or enemy? Will AI take away our jobs or give us more jobs? Will AI kill us or help us? What are the right questions to ask about artificial intelligence?

“Who is buying the AI solution” is the right question to ask. AI only attempts to reach the goal you give it in the most efficient way possible based on the available data. So if a manager that likes to buy technology to replace jobs buys the AI solution for their business, that’s what will happen. Always follow the money.

Is AI empowering people to become more creative? Will it give us an opportunity to engage in more creative professions?

For now, yes. AI is excellent at replacing time-consuming menial tasks. In the SEO industry, for example, AI can already do a much better job, 1000X quicker, than any human. Assuming the human that used to do SEO is a marketer, that frees their time for more creative, dynamic marketing tasks. But, in the long term, AI will take over on the creative front too.

In your recent talk you said AI is a mirror we are looking at. What do we see in this mirror today?

When we launch AI solutions that use computer vision to determine individuals and their race, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, and more, we get wildly different results. Searches for white people return happy, stock photography people. In one famous example, however, searches for black people returned images of criminals and their mug shots. That’s because of our own cognitive biases in the underlying data. It is vital for us to do a better job at this. There’s no easy answer, but populating databases with images from all walks of life and in a natural state is a good start.

To have more objective AI, we need balanced datasets. How can we collect such data?

There are many ways to collect data. Microsoft has recently populated its databases with images of people’s faces by creating viral campaigns, such as the “guess your age” tool that produced so many absurd results, people that took part shared the results with their friends, and that made the campaign explode worldwide.

You are involved in tech sector, as you say, “since computers had black screens with the wide choice of green or orange text.” How do you feel tech journalism evolved since then?

Journalism is more focused on speed now than ever before. The news isn’t news an hour after it breaks, whereas before you would have a day or more before the content expired. Attention spans are shorter than ever. Journalists also have to be multimedia now — words are incredible, but video and other channels are essential.

Anna Pozniak

Written by

PR Partner at Bulba Ventures, passionate about collecting vinyl records, travel, and talking to people. Amateur DJ and house dancer.

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