AI – Luddites and Light Switches

 It seems to me, an old man with a lot of rudimentary computing experience that the current hulla-balloo about Artificial Intelligence, it's promise, is either polly-ann-ish, or outright deceptive.  Let us discuss for a minute the public perception in my close-by neighborhood.

The generalized fear is that AI will replace people. End of story. These machines will somehow become self actuating and self replicating. Ultimately they will do whatever we human types do and we will be out of a job; whatever that particular job is. So we better get busy finding a new line of employment before the AI figures out what we are doing and gets there before us.

The much brighter vision is that AI will begin doing the menial work we loathe. AI will do the cleaning and the cooking, begin doing the hard tasks, the hot work, and the danger will go out of our lives. Nothing but improvement for humanity and the only people effected are those who do the menial labor, the hot work, and the dangerous stuff; you know . . . immigrants. Those people need to find better work or become useless and superfluous back in their old countries.

Of course there's a spectrum of possibilities between these two and the AI hub-bub will most certainly bleed over the outside edges of these two visions as well. But the fact of the matter is that AI cannot do any of these things, and likely won't be able to do much of this for many years, likely decades, possibly a century or so. Despite the hype, this isn't happening. Let me explain.

I have been in the computing world for many decades. I did manual labor directly for Steve Jobs. My Step mother had Wosniak over to the house before his name became well known. I spent my early teen years punching card stock on a big machine to program a much bigger machine that couldn't compete for computing power with a modern blood pressure monitor. I built my own computers through the 8086 chipset days, with their 5.5 inch floppies and 256K of storage and continued to engage in this until it just got cheaper to buy a laptop which did everything I ever dreamed of. I knew personally the guy who helped create the MP4 format and waited patiently for the 1982 promise of streaming video and broadband internet to deliver the movies in 2012. I adopted cellular telephony as soon as I could afford it and bought a smart phone as soon as they got into the price range I desired. I witnessed the entirety of the Internet's birth while in the military and watched it grow for almost fifty years. I paid attention to this extraordinary period of informational growth and access with curiosity and took the good with the bad. Not once was I filled with overwhelming wonder because I saw the actual bones of the baby before the flesh got added; saw the bubbles bursting even as the pundits huffed and puffed. So much soap.

And AI, for all it's promise, is just another thing of this fictional genre. Possible, but not probable. Certainly not practical. All the bubbles people seem willing to invest and believe in will be found to be more bubbles in the making once the current flotilla fails to fly. And here's why it will sink.

At the root of computing is the idea of data. Computers keep this in files. Files are simply numerical things filled with organizations of letters and numbers designed to keep things where things go for use when they are needed. Computers access these things when ask, develop these things as instructed, and output whatever the result is when the result is found. Back in the old days (back when Luddites worried about computers taking their jobs) much of what went into the machines was trash, so when we ask it to tell us something we didn't know we got trashy answers. Things have become better since then.

Faster computers, loads of data, billions of lines of code. If you hadn't seen the beginning you wouldn't have reason to suspect that what these wondrous things do is just the same as they have always done, only faster. The machines are much smaller, and they do so much more and, strangely, unemployment decreased because we still needed people to put the data in, tell the machine what to do, and read the results. Result which are likely going to need correction because the inputs were trash in the first place.

This is not to say the machines are trash, they are not, but the paperless promise cut down a lot of trees and the wireless promise installed a lot of wires. If you were to guess how much wrong information, both accidental and intentionally included was contained in the database we call the Internet you might have to say about half of what we know is suspect and all of it will take a human with an education to know the difference. If you were to ask an AI, the best ever created, to tell you how much of the data is false it would wait for more instructions. It would need to know what the scope of the project is, where to find the data, what does false mean, and then give you an answer which is likely needing analysis and correction by human minds.

AI is a machine trick incapable of making a moral choice and having not stake in the decision. It might someday be able to follow a well defined set of instructions and procedures for making a pseudo moral choice and might one day do this so as to be thought of as good at it. But humanity still has no such set of moral definitions to work from which might allow the programmers to commence work writing code. Eventually these machine choices will fail and be amended to call for other programs and fuzzier statistical manipulators which check the work and seem to decide better. But these machine will only give you what you gave them and do with it what they were told to do with ever increasing specificity. Don't expect this to happen any decade coming soon to your lifetime.

AI has limits as to what it possibly might do. It might become a light switch which knows when to turn on the lights in many situations. But the switch will still need to be given instructions to work the way the user wishes it would; instructions which might take as much time as flipping on the lights a thousand times. There will be many thousands of man hours dedicated to making this basic system of light switching to actually perform as expected. The promise of the intelligent light switch, if we ever get around to it, is potentially achieved in the efficient replication of the invention which lowers costs, (which will take a bit of time to be set up before promises come true). Today all you need do is walk over to the wall and flip the switch and this might always be the case whether they build smart switches or not; but saving humanity a few hundred thousand hours and countless piles of treasure takes a different moral choice.

Automobiles and airplanes might someday move themselves with speed and accuracy, but they will get to do this because thousands of people made millions of moral choices and hypothetical questions were eventually answered to our collective agreements. Until then self-flying planes will crash, self driving cars will find themselves driving in circles or into rivers, both economic decisions. The tragedies will continue and moral decisions about the effective usefulness of the machine will be sorted out by legislators and invisible market based hands. Until then employment of drivers and pilots will continue. The AI promise un-kept for the time being despite the hype.

Today we are being ask to allow the building of thousands of expensive data centers where the promise of AI is said will be found. We are ask to invest in the bright new future of AI light switches and talking bathroom mirrors, none of which we need, and most of which will fail on design or marketing made by people capable of doing what AI can never really do: make a moral choice which will hold up in the real world of life, legality, and longevity. But it isn't going to happen they way they sell it today. It might happen some day, but not how they planned it. And we don't have to allow these hypothetically driven dreamers to gamble the life we have on their promise of the life we someday might.