Real AI just isn’t that sexy
Over the next few days I’ll be attending a retreat in Norway at the Juvet Hotel (where Ex Machina was filmed) to discuss A.I, and what it means, with people much smarter than I.
Quick recap on some of my thoughts so far: deep learning is no longer something you can afford to ignore in industry, and I’m not (yet) a fan of mimicking humans too closely.
Based on the conversations I’ve been having recently, a few things have come to light about how the current AI hypetrain is going down.
- People don’t understand it; they’re not connecting the woolly concepts of AI / big data to their own lives. They know it might be interesting / threatening, but they have no solid, sense-making stories to make sense of it with. Recently I was talking to a group who do investigative journalism, and someone said that the state of play is such that the way they investigate could just as be transplanted into the New York Times circa 1930s. They know data/tech is there, they just don’t know how it might be useful. I guess this makes AI a ‘known unknown’ — as Rumsfeld might have put it.
- The fear of being replaced is most-definitely at the front of people’s minds. I spoke at a travel conference on voice assistants, and the principle question I got was whether travel agents would be replaced by computers (also a ‘known unknown’, but quite a leap given what I’ve read about where AI is now — i.e. we can’t mimic intelligence without knowing what it really is). In the age of the algorithm, the conversation seems significantly de-railed by all this projection about mimicking ourselves.
So, organisations that aren’t yet data or digital savvy need to get with the programme and understand it’s power — to augment what they’re already doing with the (so-far) narrow AI that is deep learning. This can only be done by the means of story-telling; people desperately need some way to make sense of it that’s not a simplistic tale of killer / servile job-stealing sex-bots.
This may be the most important task about AI: not to evangelise, but deepen understanding and enrich the conversation about how this technology will change our lives. I must say, I don’t really trust mainstream journalism to do it, or the fiction I’ve seen lately. I guess the stuff that AI is really about is just not that tangible/sexy a topic.
