The Specter of AI

We all love to fear something. If you Google ‘phobias’, there would be hardly a thing of which someone is not afraid. I am not sure if there is already a psychological term for it, but plenty of people are already spooked by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The fears are on many front, ranging from AI will take over my job to AI will take over the world! The poor AI! If it were aware about our apprehensions, it might have felt so ‘honoured!

But that’s the thing about AI -it’s not sentient. Although movies like Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Matrix trilogy have created the spectre of a sentient, that’s to say self-aware AI, bringing doomsday for humanity, the real AI is far too humble and innocuous to harbour such aspirations.

AI is a set of algorithms designed to capture and read data, predict multiple possibilities and then decide a course of action around a given set of variable. These variables can be anything, like change in temperature, a loud noise, a curve on road or a sudden shape that darts across the road. But for AI, all of these changes are just fluctuation in the flow of data to which it has to respond as per the instructions provided to it. At its heart, therefore, AI is not very different from a clerk sitting with detailed instructions sets enumerating the tasks it has to perform in various different situations. Its strengths come from the people who have provided those instructions, as does it weaknesses. Consequently when an automated car jumps the curb and grazes its bumper against a roadside pole, you know it’s not the malevolency of AI behind this action- it’s the ineffective instructions list that was sent to it.

However, there is a difference between AI and your average clerk. AI doesn’t have any distractions. It doesn’t have friends to chat to, dogs to take care of, a date to hang out with or a passion to follow. With no life to speak of, it can commit it’s time to the menial, routine, and laborious works to produce highly precise results.

Let’s say you are Mayor of a city just about to host one of the biggest summer parades. A couple of million people will throng the street and they will all dance, drink, party and expect to be completely safe. Hah! It’s a security nightmare. Even with all the surveillance capabilities, how do you expect to marshal staff who can continually monitor 2 million people along miles long stretch dotted with numerous bylanes and alleys? And even for the handful of surveillance staff of your office, is it realistic to expect they will devout every minute of their shift carefully looking at feeds from thousands of street cameras to spot any crime? The consequences are that as a Mayor you will learn about all the mugging and assault incidences only after parade is over, and

in all probability you will never learn who the perpetrators were. Not cutting a very inspiring image for next day’s news editions!

Enter the AI!

Not only it can monitor all the thousands of security cameras simultaneously, it can do that every second through the day without a blink of an eye. The moment it spots an altercation, a brawl, or a couple of thugs trying to intimidate someone in back of a cul-de-sac, it can record the entire scene, capture GPS of the location where incident is taking place, alert the nearest security officers, and initiate a movement tracking of the suspected thugs, all these before you can say ‘hey presto’. In fact if it’s a really smart AI, it can also face-scan each of the suspect and run through data-base of known offenders to spot a match. Viola, the AI will either help your police to interrupt the crime or arrest the suspects before they have even distributed their loot. And now your chances of shining in next day’s news editions are indeed very bright.

There are countless more scenarios where AI can bring a level of efficiency and accuracy that neither possible not reasonably expected by human operators. Ergo, AI is not taking over any job, at least not the interesting ones. It’s really a question we need to ask ourselves that do we really wake up with the idea of creating a career in scanning spread-sheets 8 hours a day, or looking at tiny monitors in a cubbyhole as the time and life flies outside the window ?

For more, stay tuned.