{"id":3989,"date":"2024-09-14T18:27:42","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T18:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3989"},"modified":"2024-09-25T18:32:59","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T18:32:59","slug":"fears-about-technology-are-fears-about-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3989","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFears about technology are fears about capitalism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading How AI Will Change Your Life by Patrick Dixon and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, for the Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n

According to Patrick Dixon, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, artificial intelligence will not bring about the end of the world. It isn\u2019t even going to bring about the end of human civilisation. It\u2019ll struggle even to take over our jobs. (If anything, signs point to a decrease in unemployment.)<\/p>\n

Am I alone in feeling cheated here? In 2014, Stephen Hawking said we were doomed. A decade later, Elon Musk is saying much the same. Last year, Musk and other CEOs and scientists signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, demanding a pause on giant AI experiments.<\/p>\n

But why listen to fiery warnings from the tech industry? Of 5,400 large IT projects (for instance, creating a large data warehouse for a bank) recorded by 2012 in a rolling database maintained by McKinsey, nearly half went over budget, and over half under-delivered. In How AI Will Change Your Life, author and business consultant Dixon remarks, \u201cSuch consistent failures on such a massive scale would never be tolerated in any other area of business.\u201d Narayanan and Kapoor, both computer scientists, say that academics in this field are no better. \u201cWe probably shouldn\u2019t care too much about what AI experts think about artificial general intelligence,\u201d they write. \u201cAI researchers have often spectacularly underestimated the difficulty of achieving AI milestones.\u201d<\/p>\n

These two very different books want you to see AI from inside the business. Dixon gives us plenty to think about: AI\u2019s role in surveillance; AI\u2019s role in intellectual freedom and copyright; AI\u2019s role in warfare; AI\u2019s role in human obsolescence \u2013 his exhaustive list runs to over two dozen chapters. Each of these debates matter, but we would be wrong to think that they are driven by, or were even about, technology at all. Again and again, they are issues of money: about how production gravitates towards automation to save labour costs; or about how AI tools are more often than not used to achieve imaginary efficiencies at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable. Why go to the trouble of policing poor neighbourhoods if the AI can simply round up the usual suspects? As the science-fiction writer Ted Chiang summed up in June 2023, \u201cFears about technology are fears about capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

As both books explain, there are three main flavours of artificial intelligence. Large language models power chatbots, of which GPT-4, Gemini and the like will be most familiar to readers. They are bullshitters, in the sense that they\u2019re trained to produce plausible text, not accurate information, and so fall under philosopher Harry Frankfurt\u2019s definition of bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. At the moment they work quite well, but wait a year or two: as the internet fills with AI-generated content, chatbots and their ilk will begin to regurgitate their own pabulum, and the human-facing internet will decouple from truth entirely.<\/p>\n

Second, there are AI systems whose superior pattern-matching spots otherwise invisible correlations in large datasets. This ability is handy, going on miraculous, if you\u2019re tackling significant, human problems. According to Dixon, for example, Klick Labs in Canada has developed a test that can diagnose Type 2 diabetes with over 85 per cent accuracy using just a few seconds of the patient\u2019s voice. Such systems have proved less helpful, however, in Chicago. Narayanan and Kapoor report how, lured by promises of instant alerts to gun violence, the city poured nearly 49 million dollars into ShotSpotter, a system that has been questioned for its effectiveness after police fatally shot a 13-year-old boy in 2021.<\/p>\n

Last of the three types is predictive AI: the least discussed, least successful, and \u2013 in the hands of the authors of AI Snake Oil (4 STARS) \u2013 by some way the most interesting. So far, we\u2019ve encountered problems with AI\u2019s proper working that are fixable, at least in principle. With bigger, better datasets \u2013 this is the promise \u2013 we can train AI to do better. Predictive AI systems are different. These are the ones that promise to find you the best new hires, flag students for dismissal before they start to flounder, and identify criminals before they commit criminal acts.<\/p>\n

They won\u2019t, however, because they can\u2019t. Drawing broad conclusions about general populations is often the stuff of social science, and social science datasets tend to be small. But were you to have a big dataset about a group of people, would AI\u2019s ability to say things about the group let it predict the behaviour of one of its individuals? The short answer is no. Individuals are chaotic in the same way as earthquakes are. It doesn\u2019t matter how much you know about earthquakes; the one thing you\u2019ll never know is where and when the next one will hit.<\/p>\n

How AI Will Change Your Life is not so much a book as a digest of bullet points for a PowerPoint presentation. Business types will enjoy Dixon\u2019s meticulous lists and his willingness to argue both sides against the middle. If you need to acquire instant AI mastery in time for your next board meeting, Dixon\u2019s your man. Being a dilettante, I will stick with Narayanan and Kapoor, if only for this one-liner, which neatly captures our confused enthusiasm for little black boxes that promise the world. \u201cIt is,\u201d they say, \u201cas if everyone in the world has been given the equivalent of a free buzzsaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Reading How AI Will Change Your Life by Patrick Dixon and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, for the Telegraph According to Patrick Dixon, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, artificial intelligence will not bring about the end … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[392,1186,184],"class_list":["post-3989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-ai","tag-business","tag-futurology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3990,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions\/3990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}