AI Fails with the Wow Factor
I was working in Hong Kong when a client invited me into their apartment in a place called Discovery Bay (aptly named as it turned out), he was super excited and quite a short man was hopping about saying I had to see something. the enthusiasm was palpable.
He knew I has a vague interest in computers, I was working in Telecoms at the time. I was dragged into the bedroom and shown a computer I have no idea what it was, but my client just wrote ‘Hello World’ hit a button and told me that now the whole world could see what he had written. Anyone anywhere could read it. All they needed was to know where to look.
It was a true Wow moment, it was a bit like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or seeing the Pyramids up close for the first time. You cannot help but say the word Wow. I cannot remember all the details, did we have a URL was it just an IP address, what system, software, or was it all on Usenets, all were just details, a bit like it must have been for the first Car enthusiasts, a gearbox here or there means nothing when something moves.
Can I say the same about Artificial Intelligence? I can tell you one thing, I truly want to say Wow, but I just can’t, instead, I am more prone to thinking Terminator Movies. As you know, I don’t really regurgitate the mainstream media in these blogs, so I have to assume you, my readership, have read up on a few things in the developments of AI. Instead, I’ll just express a few antidotes for you.
The Job Seeker
It’s a tough world and my parents definitely tried to make me a doctor, lawyer or later on a Farmer of some description. Of course that did not work, instead I ended up with a career in a business they had never heard of. And my question on this point is how many of us have? The likelihood of anyone doing a job their parents, let alone their grandparents, have ever heard of seems to be receding with every decade. I’d never heard of AI when I was young, it didn’t exist.
Now you can get Degrees, BAs, Masters and all the rest in AI, there’s a lot of research going on. But in the jobs market which one would think is also plentiful, but it is fairly disappointing at that moment. When I first built websites – they were revelatory, something from nothing that the whole world can see. An image, design, function, useful, entertaining and more important than anything else available to all, anywhere, across the globe.
AI careers on the other hand seem insignificant to bordering on boring, anyone working in AI can by definition only be part of a much bigger project. Sure you can start your own AI company or consultancy, but what will you work on? AI promises to hold keys to many things from better crop production to robots, from governing our finances to washing our dishes. It’s huge, but totally un-encompassing. You can only ever be a small cog in a bigger wheel. I find that rather disappointing. The breakthroughs a very few AI gurus will make will only have a small impact on their local team, which in turn will magnify and possibly change the world, but an individual will not be able to say they did it. Unlike the founders of millions of ‘website owners’ or inventors of ‘things’.
So – what usually happens in the AI world is that researchers and highly qualified people come out of University, enter the job market, find their initial roles spectacularly un-interesting and more often than not return to education… whereas at some point they find they are overqualified, making finding that ideal job even more difficult.
Of course, I am overgeneralising, but I am doing so to stress a point only. There become fewer and fewer people on the ground willing to do the boring jobs within AI, such as teaching the computer. Whereas we have what appears to be a glut of PhDs that end up stuck in education. it will I am such balance itself out one day.
It’s not Global
There is real talk (in the West) about the Global advantages of AI – I feel that is a sort of excuse to make us feel better in the West. Sure one use of AI is to work out better management of the world’s resources, but that’s fairly lame. Here’s the real problem.
Geoffrey Hinton (the Google man) stated that if he had not worked so hard on AI then someone else would have, thus the Atom Bomb idea. And indeed AI development is largely sponsored by the world’s wealthiest countries, USA, UK, Germany etc. There’s a reason for this. Firstly as Geoffrey Hinton says – if we don’t do it someone else will and secondly, truly the leaders in AI will control everyone else.
If Egypt were to be the world leader in AI as an example, picking a totally random, yet poverty-stricken country, it would transform its economy and re-instate Egypt as the advanced civilisation it once was. Well, we in the west cannot allow that. We have to be there first.
Unfortunately, the problem goes deeper, in that the Rich/Poor divide between nations and people will only grow. We don’t give our technologies to poorer countries, indeed if you think about computers generally, 98% of the world’s computers are run on Microsoft and every single one of those has resulted in a small amount of money heading in one direction only, back to the States.
Every Crop Algorithm, Electric Car or Robotic Factory worker AI produces will see some money transfer from the poorer world to the richer world. It’s inescapable. And it’s the reason our countries in the West are trying so hard to be at the top of the AI food chain.
In fact, it will be worse, I suspect due to the dangers of AI in general, similar to the Nuclear Threat of planetary destruction what we’re seeing now are the ground steps for disallowing much of the world access to AI. We aren’t going to share it.
If you want any sort of proof of that just look at our history with new technologies… there are few if any African Auto Makers, there are very few chip makers, mostly in the USA and Taiwan, and even clothing is largely done in very few countries namely China. It’s like wealthy countries have literally divided up the world. Can poorer countries compete, not really, they don’t have the capacity, they don’t have the skill set. And AI is not going to help them either, instead, it will increase their dependence on Richer countries.
Separating Science from Ethics
AI is one of those technologies that is like the Atom Bomb, everything is pointing to how the future of computers will develop and the unlimited imagination, that incidentally, the World Wide Web, has given us is leading people to develop and develop… It is true that if one scientist doesn’t do this research another will. But this is a failure of our system of society. Scientists will literally invent until the cows come home with no thought of the consequences. One wonders if the invention of the wheel foresaw any of the troubles that might be caused by pollution. He did not.
The scientist then offsets his efforts through delegation to some sort of ethical body. This was broken for example when the Church of Rome kicked Galileo out for saying the Earth was round. Or more dangerously when Hitler commanded his top scientists to make a bigger bomb. Our society does kick back or try to every now and again, but it’s usually too late.
Genetics or cloning is another branch of science that is proving extremely difficult to get right morally and ethically. The trouble is our society cannot begin to control these things until after they have been invented. Our scientists, a bit like ‘priests-in-the-past’ have been given too loose a reign over what they do.
I am not one for controlling people or things… But instead, a possible solution is a greater emphasis on responsibility and working out what effect something will have on the future. If we invent a plastic card that removes the need for Cash in our pockets… what actual effect does that have on the use of Cash and in particular on the people and conditions where only Cash will suffice. What new ‘powers’ will use the lack of cash, what are the dangers? All these things need to be questioned.
In our current system, we leave the science to the scientists and the ethics to the political/religious watchdogs. When really and truly we need far greater and better integration so that the Scientist as see far more clearly the consequences of his research. Without the tools, the scientist cannot be held responsible and he needs to be given the tools.
How does this relate to the Wow factor of AI, quite simply, the only Wow I can think of is more of a What the Heck – we will all die.
To many thoughts
I’ve probably mixed up to many thoughts in this one article. but as someone who did say the word Wow when the World Wide Web was invented, it’s hard not to think with a bit of hindsight that far too few companies control what we see, read and hear online. We missed an opportunity to truly share in human knowledge where instead of selfishly trying to keep someone on our own petty little websites, we could have tried to ensure we always lead people to more knowledge from experts in our own fields. Thank goodness for Wikipedia, which is about as close as it gets to true free-for-all knowledge sharing.
The AI simply does not have that, it will always work behind the scenes, out of sight, out of mind even, we’ll be told it’s better for our lives, but I don’t see it allows us to earn more, pay less, have more choice in our lives, increase competition, allow freedoms, Instead, I see it as a controlling, protectionistic racket that will continue to allow the richer people and nations to grow yet richer, while we ordinary people will be given minimum incomes as a replacement for our jobs.
I also see AI as leading to a bigger undergrowth of a sub-society of people living outside the ‘system’ and who will ultimately be increasingly squeezed by a system that only caters for people that conform. Most people will conform, but with AI we have all the ingredients needed for some real friction between various grades of human society.