Intelligent for what?

Apologies to Drake for inelegantly stealing his line but I’m in Canada this week, speaking at the iX Symposium at the Société des Arts Technologiques and I’ve become very interested in the concepts of artificial intelligence and how mainstream the expression has become. The world of the internet of things in which I mostly operate  has been shoved aside by pundits and the press in favour of the ‘flavour of the year’AR/VR/AI/cryptocurrency. In this new wave of techno babble, some trends are clear:

  • Wilful ignorance of the experiential and hardware limitations. How many headsets can you ship, how much do they cost, when are you using them and for who? seem to be questions no one seems to be interested in.
  •  Misunderstanding of simple computing principles. Most people use ‘AI’ when they just mean ‘computers’ or ‘maths’. More on that below.
  • Misunderstanding of the hardware realities of computing principles. No, no and for the last time, no, you can’t put (X) on the blockchain, especially if there’s a hardware component to (X) which implies a supply chain, which implies people. Just forget it. You can’t track a fruit from birth and you don’t want to track child exploitation in the fashion world. So there.

I’m rereading The Golden Notebook and was struck by a line early on:

‘What’s wrong with living emotionally from hand-to-mouth in a world that’s changing at fast as it is?’.

Doris Lessing wrote this in 1962 but it could have been written in 2018. In our recurring feeling of being ‘in a frenzy’ all the time, we’ve, in fact, made little progress in utilising new technologies for socially useful purposes.

I posit that Artificial Intelligence could easily be described as:

Great work everyone. If computing power isn’t there to help us become better societies, then why exactly are we using it? Where are we going? What are we not designing instead? What are we avoiding because it’s supposedly ‘too complicated’. A lack of ambition shouldn’t be confused with a lack of technical capabilities. But if we’re not ambitious about what we want from our computers, we have to ask ourselves who we’re protecting by that cowardice. The rich? The powerful? The establishment?

These are some of the topics I hope we’ll talk about this week, because I really had had enough of us talking about AI without pointing out what exactly it is, and crucially, what it isn’t.

By designswarm

Blogging since 2005.