Just as I suspected, the dream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just that, a dream. The book I am reading, titled “Feeding the Machine,” exposes the millions of workers behind the technology that is supposedly going to change the world. Although AI will help many of us be more productive when we find an APP developed expressly for a specific application we can use it for. My personal experience with AI is limited at best, and I find it annoying. Most times, I use a Chat bot at a website like my bank, or a vendor like the phone or cable service. The first thing I find useless are bots that answer only very specific questions. Most Chat-bots are developed like that. If you are seeking answers to a complicated problem there is a 99.999% chance you will need to connect with a human to get near an answer. Our suppliers, however, make us go through the steps before they give us a number to call for help. Evidently, a large number of callers are happy with the canned answers they receive.
The workers being employed live in East Africa and work nine hours a day in almost slave-like conditions. They watch videos to highlight activities that may escape the sensors used by AI applications. An example cited involved a lady walking a bicycle across a street in the crosswalk and being struck by a self-driving car. The AI used in the car could not determine that a human walking directly in front of the car was a safety issue. The job of the reviewer is to highlight this anomaly on the video to bring it to the attention of the programmer who then modifies the the algorithm to prevent a collision. The work to do this is mindless and boring. Managers require that the worker perform a set number of observations per minute and the worker keystrokes are measured and reported. If the worker does not match the requirements of the job, he is penalized, often by firing.
While all these observations are going on, billions of dollars are spent making artificial intelligence more intelligent and faster. We endure the chatbots just so big companies can use fewer paid employees to do the job. They truly believe we, the consumers, are getting the absolute best service experience that can be provided. It doesn’t matter what we believe we are getting. If they are making more money, we lose, and they keep on convincing themselves that they are making us happy.
Someday, AI may threaten society and cause people to lose their jobs, but I will not be around to witness the debacle. In the meantime, the venture capitalists who continue to pour money into AI companies will keep feeding us the Kool-Aid to convince us of how wonderful life will be when it all begins to happen.
Filed under: economy, Education, Technology | Tagged: Algorithyms, Artificial Intelligence |
Since the dawn of humankind “leaders’ have devised schemes “for our good.” And we seem to have a brain the main function of which is to tell us not to use itself (the brain) but blindly trust quacks and gurus and charlatans and other kool-aid sellers.
AI is dark, and will lead to misuse.