Are you on the proverbial bus yet? Whether it’s the AI bus or just a good old TTC ride across Toronto, we all keep running to catch something. But the real question is: where are we headed?
More than fifty years ago, I held a record for running fast in the City of Ottawa. I was naturally fast. It came handy in sports, for running from trouble (sometimes, I was a bit naughty), and it was fun. The other day, though, I ran to catch a bus. All I can say is I am glad the bus driver stopped for me. I must have looked awful, as the driver waited. As I thanked him (and the passengers!), in between gasps for air, all I could think was that I had done this before.
Not so long ago – in the 1990s – many sang of the hope of what the internet would give us. Knowledge was to be at our fingertips. The promise of access to the world for the have-nots was now real. People would connect globally, collaboration would increase, and information would foster a more democratic society. The World Wide Web, after all, was designed to facilitate the sharing of information between researchers. Citizens would engage with governments, which was going to be more accountable, of course. Yes, connect and get on the bus!
Twenty two years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, Thomas Frey, the ‘futurist speaker’ and blogger, wrote of his disappointment at the failures of the promises of the world wide web:
- “No one controls the Internet” – False!
- “Borders don’t matter” – False!
- “Information wants to be free” – False!
- “Information from the many is better than information from the few” – It depends!
- “First mover advantage” – Rarely!
- “Disintermediation” – It depends!
- “The radical transparency advantage” – False!
- “People are basically good, so the fewer rules the better” – False
“I will readily admit to having gotten sucked into many of the false notions these early Internet gurus have proposed…while many of the original theories have proven delusional, new chapters in the rulebook are being written every day.”
Now, we know better. The search engines are controlled. The approved political propaganda, and carefully ‘bespoke’ advertisements based upon our private lives are forced upon us, while laws restrict what we can post and what we can see. We have less privacy, more misinformation, and more control from governments and corporations. Some might say joining a terrorist cell is easier.
And yet, this sense of unexpected failure is not willingly accepted. In fact, denial is the tantra.
And what do we have now?
Every day we are hounded to catch the Artificial Intelligence bus. In fact, it is worse than that – we are told to catch the golden future of the Unchecked AI bus! Welcome it! Let it do all for us!
On a daily basis, we are not only bombarded with why AI is so much smarter than we are, but we keep finding out new things that are, in fact, controlling and corralling us already. Only yesterday, for instance, I found out my CPAP machine has been tracking six of my vital signs – every night for the last eight years – and sending it to the vendor of the machine. I won’t tell you what your new car tells advertisers about your driving style and habits. And I promise you that you won’t be able to guess everything they track.
AI is, quite literally, a quantum step forward from the internet. Unchecked AI could control us all, and we will either obey….or else!
The solution?
The only hope is that we keep AI as a tool, and we remain the master, not AI, as we do the thinking. Let’s take a welding analogy for example. Suitable welding parameters must be evaluated. A welder will consult his charts, (or AI), but must make the final decision with his judgement, carefully weighing the boundary conditions. Boundary conditions contain a vast amount of scientific phenomena and are the constraints necessary for the solution. They are also differential equations. A differential equation defines a relationship between a quantity and its rate of change. If we lose the ability to determine the parameters ourselves, our boundaries will be fixed indeed. If we don’t know the boundary conditions, we will be shaped by another intelligence, and no longer be human.
Yes, I got a personal trainer to help me catch the bus. I’m not going to miss the show.
But I’m watching you, AI.
