Day: 20 November 2018
Is this AI? We drew you a flowchart to work it out
Karen Hao – MIT Technology Review
What is artificial intelligence? It’s a beguilingly simple question, but one which lacks a beguilingly simple answer. There’s more than one way to approach the question, of course – Chris Yiu provides mass exemplificaiton, for example (his list had 204 entries when first linked from here in January, but has now grown to 501). Terence Eden more whimsically dives down through the etymology, while Fabio Ciucci provides a pragmatic approach based on the underlying technology.
This short post takes a different approach again – diagnose whether what you are looking at is AI by means of a simple flowchart. It’s a nice idea, despite inviting some quibbling about some of the detail (“looking for patterns in massive amounts of data” doesn’t sound like a complete account of “reasoning” to me). And it’s probably going to need a bigger piece of paper soon.
A new machine age beckons and we are not remotely ready
Benedict Dellot and Fabian Wallace-Stephens – RSA
This is a refreshing post about the implications of work being displaced by machines, which isn’t about the work, the displacement, or the machines. Instead it puts forward a range of suggestions about what would need to be in place to make the consequences of that displacement socially and economically beneficial.
The ideas themselves are still fairly undeveloped at this stage – this is more a prospectus of issues to be explored than the substantive exploration – but even in embryonic form, they demonstate that a wider range of responses is possible than is often assumed. At first sight, some of the ideas look considerably more robust than others, but regardless of their specific merits, being imaginative about ways of dealing with the consequences of technology change must be a better strategy than trying to impede it.