Artificial, move on. It’s actually Augmented Intelligence
We have to focus more on the social challenges being created by technologies that Augment our Intelligence instead of the fiction Artificial Intelligence doomsday scenarios.
Many years ago, my wife and I went on a trip to Spain. On the way to the airport she realized she had forgotten her Palm Pilot (Remember them?), and she was in despair. Half of my brain is in there! she cried. She kept everything in that device: Reservations, addresses, phone numbers. Fast forward to today, where everyone’s “half brain” is on their smartphones. Most people would pick their smartphone as the first thing they would take out of a building on fire after all humans and pets are known to be safe. A big difference to that Palm Pilot incident is that, actually most of that data is somewhere in the cloud and could be recovered without major losses. And you would also recover all the helpers we call apps that we have in our devices. Most of these apps relay on backend servers anyway. And more and more are using AI to operate.
But, Half of my brain is in there!
What we call AI has slowly been changing our lives. When is the last time you used a paper map?, or saw somebody pull out a paper agenda?, or browsed through a paper photo album? Douglas Adams wrote about the Bablefish in his novel “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”. He could not know that we would call it by the more mundane Google translate name.
When I tell people that I am working with AI technologies they usually associate pictures of Terminators and Matrix like worlds with my work. They don’t realize that they are already living in a world where technology Augments their Intelligence. I usually point to them that AI is just one of the next steps on our technological progress. When driving through an old tunnel you can see the unevenness of the surface, where the human beings that built them used their shovels to dig them. We have now monster machines doing this work. They do it faster, safer and more economically than 100 years ago when such a project came at a high cost of human life. Just a few weeks ago I was watching a video of this humongous machine in China that can lay bridge sections in hours.
Same as these machines allow a reduced crew to lay a bridge much faster and at a reduced cost than before, our AI allows all people doing service work to be more productive. Thanks to Google translate we don’t need as many translators as we used to need a few years ago. And this productivity increase is spreading across all sectors.
I started my professional life working for a construction company. We were using directional drilling to lay pipelines under rivers or highways. My first project was to create a user interface to draw the path and calculate how far off the guiding pipe was out in the field. This replaced the cumbersome and error prone job of plotting this by hand on a very long piece of paper. This bridge building machine is just one more step in our technological progress in the construction area.
When I show this machine to people they happily accept it as the wonderful piece of engineering that it is. Yet when I explain what some of our AI algorithms do the look in their faces denotes a more defensive and less accepting expression.
Some people think AI is this black box filled with mystery that is out to control the world. Yet in my opinion that is not the problem we should focus on. Yes, we do have Deep Learning neural networks that can be feed a picture with apples and come back with “Granny Smith”. But we are way far from having a machine that suddenly wakes up and has a will of its own.
When I started programming almost 30 years ago I was using a black and white editor (Actually green and black). To compile my code I had to run several compiler programs one after the other and afterwards the linker. The order of the files in the linker was crucial to avoid the poor thing throwing a fit trying to resolve file dependencies. Fast forward to today and I have an editor that actually compiles my code while I am editing and pops up these suggestions with possible fixes that it detects.
A project of the size that I have been working for in the last few months would have required a team double in size just 5 years ago. When you start typing and your editor starts suggesting corrections your intelligence and productivity is being augmented. When you browse your photos and a name of a friend that the algorithms have detected shows up with a suggestion of sharing the photos with her, your intelligence is being augmented as well.
I have not yet met a compiler that starts coding on its own.
All these AI technologies that we are using, are silent helpers sitting quietly in the corner until you need them. My mother in law would call me to tell me about her health issues. Siri has never called me to tell me about the state of her servers. Our current algorithms are great at churning lots of data and helping us decide on our actions. We do not yet have algorithms that can use context to provide non “idiot savant” kind of answers half of the time. They lack common sense.
I’m not trying to say that one or more of the science fiction flavors of Artificial Intelligence will not become reality. What I see the issue to be is that we are ignoring the changes created by our Augmented Intelligence. Let me quote Larry Page’s interview by the Financial Times: “You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.”
Let me share 2 graphs. The first one shows the historical distribution of employment among the agriculture, industry and services sectors in the US. The second one shows the youth unemployment rate in the world.
Our Augmented Intelligence technologies will have its major impact on the service sector. The productivity increase of a programmer means we need less of them. Self driving trucks means we need less truck drivers. And this also means we need less restaurants and hotels along the highways. The youth employment graph says that despite the increased Gross Domestic Product of the world we are needing less people to create these riches.
What these graphs are telling us is that we need yet another category next to Agriculture, Industry and Services. I like to call that the Attention sector, also known as the “Do what you love enabled by the universal income” category. After all, these unemployed young folks are not just sitting idle. Some of them are teaching themselves online new stuff. Some are keeping afloat with odd jobs. But most of them have a strong presence online. Chatting, taking photos, shooting videos. These activities are financed by advertisements, and you pay with your attention.
I actually argued in a previous post that universal income is already with us in the form of many free or low cost services that we have access. You have a translator at your fingertips, and a spelling corrector, and no need to buy paper maps. You don’t have to pay for getting your photos printed, and can attend courses of the most prestigious universities for free. Working on this new project has teach me that we actually pay for these services with our attention. The freemium (Mix between Free and Premium) model that we are using at WeaveMyStory means that you can use our services free of charge if you accept some ads in your content, or pay a small fee for no ads. One of the services we are offering is to create Facebook Instant Articles for authors. Our experience with current users show that by far most of the people will choose the ad sponsored model.
Larry Page said in the same interview “Even if there’s going to be a disruption on people’s jobs, in the short term that’s likely to be made up by the decreasing cost of things we need, which I think is really important and not being talked about.” This is what the Augmented Intelligence algorithms will bring. How do we prepare for this future?
