16 Comments
Apr 11Liked by John Birmingham

I should preface this comment with the disclaimer that I work in the advanced analytics department of my employer, and we're using AI and other tools to optimise our operations.. That said, I rely on the actual smart people (data scientists, engineers and analysts) to do the work, I'm just a business analyst dealing, ironically, with the human interaction and expertise bit.

I’m with you Andrew in that it’s not really “intelligence”, artificial or otherwise. Machine learning is more accurate but still not quite there. The uses we’re finding for it is in crunching enormous data sets and finding patterns and insights it would take a human days or weeks to manage on their own, if they could manage it at all, and without the, er, risk of human error.

The new washing machine I bought last year apparently has “AI” to help me optimise my loads. What it really has is an algorithm that detects the load cycles I use the most (bedding, towels, intense cold) and presents them to me when I turn the machine on. Which is useful but hardly “intelligent”.

The way everything now has “AI” in it tells you what a gimmick most of it is. Working with AI tools it's clear that for all their potential the actually valuable aspects of them do not exist without human input or intervention; in my work we need human oversight AND insight - human expertise - to render value from what the AI is producing. The most valuable things our AI is doing is either speeding up tedious manual work, for example extracting information from product info sheets automagically that would otherwise require a human being to trawl through and manually collate, or speeding up/enhancing human decision making or analysis - crunching data that humans did not have either the time or the capacity to do themselves, and then using that to make decisions. While we have unlocked insights and efficiencies with AI that were previously not accessible, we are nowhere near replacing the human element in the process. So much of what we're doing is tempered by the human experts going "yes that's very interesting but it doesn't take into account A, B, C because of X, Y, Z..." and then we have to go refine our models and business rules again. And that's just for the bits where we can identify patterns and data; there's so much that's essentially ineffable, driven by human instinct, observation and experience that AI models can't begin to replicate.

I would argue that we won’t have genuine artificial intelligence until we have artificial sentience; and that’s likely to be decades if not centuries away. Space Karen can argue that AI will be smarter than us in a few years but he’s full of it. What we’ll have is a highly refined algorithm that can collate and parse data at a speed and complexity never before seen, and therefore process that data in ways we hadn’t imagined were possible until now, but that doesn’t make it intelligent.

That said, I'm all here for tools that help you do your best more efficiently or better; how much of human productivity is stymied by having to arrange and collate your notes/thoughts/stream of consciousness into something usable, and by then the idea has floated away never to be revisited?

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This is one of the smartest things I’ve ever read about AI use cases.

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Oh goodness, thank you! 🥰

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when i was a uni student i worked in a factory during the hols to earn extra cash before heading back, the place where dad worked, he was a toolmaker stuck in a room measuring sonar pieces for defence contracts etc (and not the boss) but he asked if there were any odd jobs needing done. So i got a job with the maintenance guys, sweeping a factory floor here, cleaning the bins in the static sensitive production floor there (all the chinese ladies in that room used to give me lollies/food and fuss over me), the odd toilet clean run. Until one day they needed 1000 holes drilled in tiny bits of metal for some job. I breezed through it and then got pulled aside by one of the workers who said "Simon, we reckon you're great, but you need to slow it down or there wont be any jobs for us to stretch out". I think about that day often and wonder when it will be the "AI's" time to be pulled aside.

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I don't think we'll end up at that point, although you raise an excellent conundrum.

As we derive actual value (as opposed to the nonsense that a lot of AI GPTs are generating) we'll end up in a situation where, instead of pulling the AI aside and telling it to pull its head in, we'll have to reorganise society to compensate for the consequences of deriving that value.

The value in entry level, unskilled work lies in giving young people entry to the workforce and learning life skills that they then build on as their careers progress. But as we automate or eliminate those jobs in order to increase human productivity, we’re going to have to redefine what an ‘entry level’ job means, which will likely mean a job that’s far more complex and requires different skills than current entry level jobs. Which means education will need to change to not only prepare young people for those new types of entry level jobs, but the development of those basic life skills will need to happen in an educational environment and not at work. Which also means social support and services will need to change radically, especially for those who will not be able to bridge the gap between what is required for an entry level job now and an entry level job in the future.

If anyone’s ever wondered where the janitors, burger flippers, cleaners etc are in Star Trek, and how being a navigator or security guard on an intergalactic starship now appear to be entry level roles, this is how we get there. What we probably don’t see in Star Trek is the equivalent of a universal basic income and access to universal basic services in their post capitalist society looking after everyone who didn’t get to be an astronaut when they grew up.

While artists and writers are understandably and justifiably raising the alarm about what AI is doing to creativity, they’re the canary in the coal mine on what it’s going to do to society in general. If we don’t bring people with us on the journey, and ensure that the gains derived from AI are shared across society and not hoarded by the 0.1% to enrich themselves, the societal upheaval in the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions are going to be tiny blips in comparison to the anarchy that will be unleashed over the next couple of decades, assuming society survives the climate emergency 🤷‍♀️

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i respond a lot with tongue in cheek to a lot of things - sarcasm being a great tool to employee in day to day life. But i was sitting around a fire with old friends and discussing seriously the changes from when we were kids and trying to figure out what the "can you grandkids program the video player?" will be for us. They've already become a bit inflexible societal wise, one example being all these new fangled ideas about people being trans and "back in my day" to which i try my earnest to explain but it hits a brick wall a lot of times. Apart from that we figured that seeing we were born in an age with technology, we grew up with it and can wrap our heads around it (being a bunch of technically minded people in careers etc) or at least have an inkling in how to figure it out, but not sure how long that will last. I do wonder if we have any societal upheavals left in us though (us being capitalist western society) its almost geared so we dont/wont/cant do that anymore. Hell, we seem to argue 50/50 on every topic out there as a society that we wouldnt be able to mobilise a decent chunk of us to agree on what we were trying to change.

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I can test on my dad if you like. It might cause the machine to leave the room.

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" ramble into your microphone of choice for up to 10 minutes and then spits out a really well organised document" well that just sounds like a challenge. I want to read it 10 minutes from Burrough's Naked Lunch or Joyce's Finnagan's wake and lets see how well organised a document it produces.

I also have seen some using the term Machine Learning instead of AI. I expect its too late to see it become widely adopted but I think its a more useful description with less inherent hype than the term AI.

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I hope that some other term ends up sticking, as neither of them are really "correct", IMO. When you know how the "training" is done, you understand that the machines aren't really learning, as that term is generally understood, so that one's out. And while the result kind of "feels" like AI (and Elon reckons it'll be "smarter" than us next year), it's very much less than that when you get into it. Large-scale statistical language analysis and chaotic excitation of strange attractors in idea space are too much of a mouthful though.

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We've already got Alexa and Siri, HAL even, so why can't we just have 'Bob' or whatever?

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Apr 11·edited Apr 11

"that some other term ends up sticking" any suggestions I am always keen to use

a better description.

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Spicey autocorrect

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Spicy Autocorrect Orator or SAO. Just dont get it wet.

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Eww, soggy translator.

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Ooooh I want me some of that word salad organiser

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Imma write it up for you next week.

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