The Artificial Intelligence Trickle
Source: Matt Watts
The phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ is misused a lot. It instantly conjures images of dystopian sci-fi movies and can be used as shorthand for sinister. That’s why Fox has run stories such as “Is the world ready for artificial intelligence Barbie?”
The phrase “AI Revolution” has been bandied about a fair bit recently and has been used to refer to increasingly sophisticated technology. While there is undoubtedly a lot of clever tech in the world, humanity has not yet succeeded in creating artificial intelligence. We’re researching it, we’re fascinated by the ethics of it, and we’ve made a lot of films about it, but I think it’s a bit early to say that there’s an AI revolution going on. At the moment, there’s a sort of AI trickle.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
This is a tricky question. Another reason that the media is flooded with claims that we’re about to experience an AI revolution is that the definition has been tinkered with. Goal posts have been moved. In order to show that the AI the media discusses and the AI they want to allude to are two different things, this article will use the Turing test as the definition of artificial intelligence.
The Turing test, designed by the enigmatic, code cracking English mathematician Alan Turing, has long been the benchmark for AI. Essentially, the test requires a machine to be indistinguishable from a human in order to be classed as artificially intelligent. No machine has ever passed it. AI of this magnitude is currently confined to our TV screens, books, and imaginations. Skynet isn’t going to be nuking us any time soon, and the machines aren’t going to turn us into batteries.
So what are the media talking about?
Generally, when the media refers to AI, they are talking about advanced technology that can mimic intelligence but, by Alan Turing’s standards, is not actually intelligent. For example, Google have said that they want to introduce AI chatbots into their messaging services. This means that they’ve got some fairly nifty computers that will talk to people �C much like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. There’s also a lot of talk about self-driving cars and delivery drones, but the question is: how will this actually effect real people?
Job losses are a big concern �C will these sophisticated new technologies do my job better than I can? We have seen technology creeping further into sectors such as retail. Self-service checkouts are now a common sight. It’s hard to say which specific jobs might be in danger in the future. There are, however, some general rules that should help you work out if your job will ever be in danger:
Is human or emotional interaction important to your job? �C If you think about it, human interaction is more important to most jobs than you realize. In retail, customers want a real person, even if it is just so they can be unpleasant to them. The healthcare sector obviously requires employees to be human, as does education.
Which is cheaper �C you or a machine? We could live in a world full of Blade Runner-esque replicants, but if a human costs less to do the same job, the human will still have that job.
While the world will continue to be reshaped by the technology we develop, it’s not time to become a neo-luddite quite yet.
| }
|