This past weekend my wife and I decided to run a few errands. This was on Saturday after a great Friday night spent with my local nephews. We ended up traveling through three different cities through the course of the day and we ran into some quite interesting things.
It seems like just about anywhere you look these days, you are seeing Artificial Intelligence in one form or another. Either people are talking about it, thinking about it, or erroneously calling something AI which isn't.
We were walking through one of the local Sam's Clubs and we came across the little guy in the photo above cleaning the floors. If you have ever seen these things, they are actually quite annoying. They give off this inscenent beep to let you know they are there and they just roam around the store doing their business.
No complaining about overtime, the low pay, or that their talents are being horrendously wasted.
I wouldn't go so far as to call what this device does AI, but I would imagine there is some form of learning involved. Whether it's the route it takes or what objects to avoid. I've only ever seen devices like this in Sam's Club, but I think it won't be long before we see more of them spread across a wide variety of applications.
As you can see, there is still a manual component to this machine, but I also don't think it will be long before that gets phased out as well.
I had a good discussion after publishing this post about how useful AI actually is right now. Personally, I'd like to see AI solving some real world problems. As it sits right now, really only see AI being used to make our lives easier.
Trust me, I am all about making life easier, but some of the applications just feel a bit lazy at times. For example, in that same post I was talking about how people were using AI to respond to questions for a scholarship application.
As a prospective college student, are you seriously telling me you can't write between 150 and 260 words about what career you want to pursue and why?
That's exactly what was happening in the post I wrote yesterday and all I could think was:
what a waste
I saw this YouTube clip of the rapper Will.i.am from Blackeyed Peas fame talking about AI the other day. It's short enough that you can watch it rather quickly at only forty eight seconds. Go ahead....
Did you catch all that? Okay, just in case you didn't, or the video didn't play for you, Will.i.am is talking about how we have been investing all this money into AI lately and because of that we have started to neglect Human Intelligence.
To paraphrase what he says in the video:
machines are becoming more articulate, able to process deep subjects and deep thoughts, and overall better at communication, whereas humans have devolved to memes, gifs, emojis, and Tweets to communicate.
It's a pretty powerful 48 seconds when you really start to think about it.
I'm not saying Tweets are evil and they are going to be the downfall of mankind, but I think it's important we take some time to meditate on that whole idea that one day machines could be better communicators than us. More innovative than us. More human than a human?
It's kind of a scary thought, not in a machines are taking over the world sort of way, but more in a look what we've become sort of way.
I'm not against AI. Really, I'm not. I think there are some big real world problems that AI is going to one day help us solve. I just hope somewhere along the line we don't lose too much of who we are to be able to appreciate it.
I wanted to share this other YouTube clip with you. It's from one of my favorite movies called The Fifth Element:
The basic gist of it goes that these little machines do all sorts of cool and useful things. We create them and we give them a purpose, but at the end of the day there are certain things they can't do, and all of that is for nothing without a little bit of the human element.
I'll admit, I took a few philosophical liberties with that explanation, but I think you can probably see where I am going.
Imagine a world where we invested in each other and ourselves the same way that we are investing in AI.
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