To AI or not to AI?
Adding both Artificial and Intelligence in the same sentence often conjures up a dystopian future where machines designed for the benefit of humankind have slightly misunderstood their programming (for a worst case scenario watch this episode of Doctor Who ).
However, this nightmare of the sci-fi genre is not a true reflection of how AI is already shaping our lives and mostly for the better. The truth is, AI is not a futuristic concept that may never happen, it’s already here. From our loan applications to the algorithms that detect banking fraud, as well as our everyday personal assistant and oracle, Google. AI is already running a big part of our daily lives and we’ve hardly noticed. For the first time in human history, we are starting to outsource our decision-making process to non-human “minds”. We are relinquishing our control at the most fundamental level — and that is scary even to people with less control issues than me.
With these algorithms, we can do many varied things; Power autonomous cars or find the perfect outfit seen on a stranger. They can even make sure that we don’t overspend.
Of course, we don’t just use AI for day to day life, we also reap huge benefits in the fields of science by using it for big data crunching. IBM’s Watson is helping to run the most remote and dangerous oil rigs in the Atlantic, by crunching fifty years’ worth of data in minutes. In this scenario, AI provides engineers with solutions that would previously have taken months and possibly cost lives to determine.
However, an algorithm is only a set of rules aiming towards an answer, AI at this level is only as good as the data we give it. For example, if you ask Google “Immigration into the UK, is it bad?” your second unbiased answer will be from an anti-immigration site and if you ask the same question slightly differently “immigration into the UK, is it good?” the second hit will now be a pro-immigration site. AI (at least for the time being) is not intuitive like a human, it does not understand nuance, or appreciate that for some questions, there are no simple answers. Ultimately AI will reflect the prejudice of the data it was given at programming stage or the prejudice of the question being asked, potentially locking us all into our own cultural bubbles.
AI experts are pretty unanimous in agreement that within the next twenty to forty years we are likely to reach AI of the calibre that can match the human mind. You know, a husky Scarlett Johansson in the film Her, but what then? How will this change our lives and hopefully for the better? Will it mean mass unemployment for all those who have been replaced by pneumatic sexbots? Or will this post-work era be a sort of modern Garden of Eden, where there is a standard wage provided by now half mechanised governments, meaning that man is free to commit himself/herself to higher spiritual pursuits? Let’s hope so…oh a snake!
The possibilities of AI in our future lives are endless and that’s what gets us excited at Yoyo. We are only at the beginning of this huge human discovery and right now AI can easily improve our daily (human) experiences IRL (remember that?). We have been having a great deal of fun creating more sophisticated chatbots amongst other exciting projects. We are focused on developing AI solutions that are the best fit for our clients and their users. We believe that what every developer should be trying to do is to put the human and the humane at the centre of any AI solution. Look out for the next article where we will explain a bit more about our UX process.
