{"id":2387,"date":"2018-05-28T20:19:31","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T20:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=2387"},"modified":"2018-05-28T20:19:31","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T20:19:31","slug":"intelligent-for-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/intelligent-for-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Intelligent for what?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apologies to Drake for inelegantly stealing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=U9BwWKXjVaI\">his line<\/a>\u00a0but I&#8217;m in Canada this week, speaking at the <a href=\"http:\/\/ix.sat.qc.ca\/\">iX Symposium at the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Arts Technologiques<\/a> and\u00a0I&#8217;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\u00a0 has been shoved aside by pundits and the press in favour of the &#8216;flavour of the year&#8217;AR\/VR\/AI\/cryptocurrency. In this new wave of techno babble, some trends are clear:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Wilful ignorance of the experiential and hardware limitations.<\/strong> 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>\u00a0Misunderstanding of simple computing principles.<\/strong> Most people use &#8216;AI&#8217; when they just mean &#8216;computers&#8217; or &#8216;maths&#8217;. More on that below.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Misunderstanding of the hardware realities of computing principles.<\/strong> No, no and for the last time, no, you can&#8217;t put (X) on the blockchain, especially if there&#8217;s a hardware component to (X) which implies a supply chain, which implies people. Just forget it. You can&#8217;t track a fruit from birth and you don&#8217;t want to track child exploitation in the fashion world. So there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m rereading The Golden Notebook and was struck by a line early on:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8216;What&#8217;s wrong with living emotionally from hand-to-mouth in a world that&#8217;s changing at fast as it is?&#8217;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Doris Lessing wrote this in 1962 but it could have been written in 2018. In our recurring feeling of being &#8216;in a frenzy&#8217; all the time,\u00a0we&#8217;ve, in fact, made little progress in utilising new technologies for socially useful purposes.<\/p>\n<p>I posit that <strong>Artificial Intelligence <\/strong>could easily be described as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Computing power doing stuff faster than I can with a piece of paper. <\/strong>(Maths)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power utilised to make me spend more money than I have.<\/strong> (See all travel ticket, hotel, or insurance purchases ever.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power utilised to confuse me into spending more money than I&#8217;d like. <\/strong>(See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/money\/2014\/10\/20\/amazon-is-not-the-king-of-cheap-online-prices\/17439307\/\">Amazon who isn&#8217;t actually the cheapest place for anything<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power utilised to reduce the amount of time spent doing something boring, making me spend more time in meetings that don&#8217;t need to happen. <\/strong>See all office jobs ever.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power that creates a new category of boring jobs in the moderation, data tagging, data verification sectors. <\/strong>(See police officers that can&#8217;t get a computer to recognise the difference between <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/british-cops-want-to-use-ai-to-spot-porn-but-it-keeps-m-1821384511\">pornography or dunes<\/a>\u00a0or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2017\/09\/05\/watson-ibm-cancer\/\">failed use of IBM Watson in cancer identification<\/a>\u00a0or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2018\/03\/23\/facebook-privacy-scandal-has-a-plus-thousands-of-new-jobs-ai-cant-do.html\">all the people Facebook has to hire<\/a> in its security group).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power that moves our admin burden from paper to online but doesn&#8217;t remove it. <\/strong>(Read about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qualitasconsortium.com\/index.cfm\/reference-material\/fundamentals\/patients-not-paperwork\/\">UK nurses who can&#8217;t do their jobs because of the admin load<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computing power that barely understands us but pretends to.<\/strong> (See Alexa that <a href=\"https:\/\/guce.oath.com\/collectConsent?brandType=eu&amp;.done=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.co.uk%2Fentry%2Fstop-alexa-accidentally-ordering-things-and-spending-your-money_uk_5a841c1de4b0cf06752031b4%3Fguccounter%3D1&amp;sessionId=1_cc-session_ae3a7b4d-cc99-4fd0-850f-f965622eca49&amp;lang=en-gb&amp;inline=false\">orders stuff on its own<\/a> or starts randomly\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.stltoday.com\/lifestyles\/simplemost\/amazon-s-alexa-accidentally-recorded-this-couple-s-private-conversation\/article_c1d289ea-6a3c-571c-bc94-74c9b276f992.html\">recording<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Great work everyone. If computing power isn&#8217;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&#8217;s supposedly &#8216;too complicated&#8217;. A lack of ambition shouldn&#8217;t be confused with a lack of technical capabilities. But if we&#8217;re not ambitious about what we want from our computers, we have to ask ourselves who we&#8217;re protecting by that cowardice. The rich? The powerful? The establishment?<\/p>\n<p>These are some of the topics I hope we&#8217;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&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apologies to Drake for inelegantly stealing his line\u00a0but I&#8217;m in Canada this week, speaking at the iX Symposium at the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Arts Technologiques and\u00a0I&#8217;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\u00a0 has been&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/intelligent-for-what\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Intelligent for what?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interaction-design","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Cv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2388,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387\/revisions\/2388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}