AI

woodbine

Do you think AI is/will be a good a bad step forward?
Personally I think it has some great possibilities along with some dangers.

C_J

A great question @woodbine I think AI could be a good thing and possibly not so good take for instance the Google assistant or the Amazon Echo you can ask them anything from the weather to recipe's I often use mine for spelling if I'm writing something or just ask it to tell me a joke (not great jokes by the way)

Those things with AI are ok but I wouldn't trust AI one hundred percent where it comes to decision as making decisions is a complicated process and even then we are capable of making the wrong decisions so how's AI (software) going to process that I guess to a certain point AI is ok but beyond that not so much.

Grinchy

I'm cautious when it comes to AI,  not sure we want it integrated into everything we do, seen far to many movies, were it went bad, but rings true to me

C_J

@Grinchy I fully agree the movies I've seen a couple of movies like that and read a couple of books it makes you think.

66Mustang

In theory I think it is a good step forward for things where emotion needs taking out of the decision making process. For example politics: AI is not selfish or susceptible to vanity, so it would make the best political decisions for the majority of people. Also law & order...it will weigh up all evidence and make a much better decision than any human.

In reality though, seeing how many bugs and glitches are in even the most simple piece of software I wouldn't trust AI with anything complex or important. Maybe in 100 years but not any time soon.

Albus_Scope

Personally, I love the idea of AI assisted things.  But only assisted, as AI should never really have full control of any situation. There's too many nuances in life that only a human brain can adapt on the fly to. But AI assisted things could be really great for so many sectors.  

Plus I'm a big sci-fi nerd, so I've read far too many horror stories.   

66Mustang

@Albus_Scope I actually think (in a perfect situation where it works properly!!) that AI would be better than humans at decision making in certain situations. Especially those where emotion negatively impacts decision making.

A good example is choosing investments on the stock market. Investors are constantly told to ignore their emotions and just invest based on the information available but almost every investor in the world still invests with an element of hope or desperation or some other emotion. People cling on to investments instead of cutting their losses, only to lose even more money!

Albus_Scope

@66Mustang Good point regarding the stock market.  I'd be a very well off man if I didn't listen to my emotions about certain stocks a few years back.  

Jimm_Scope

Unfortunately AI are not free from bias. It heavily depends on how it's built and the data it is trained with.

This was a big issue in 2 instances recently. At google they started using an AI to filter their CVs... they did some testing and found that it was biased against certain names and was rejecting them. These were names mostly used by African Americans. They had used CVs from the tech sector to train it, the tech sector is notably less representative of African Americans for various societal reasons. Even if all the other data in the CV was identical it was more likely to reject it if the name was an African American one. After discovering this I believe google scrapped using an AI to filter CVs.

And then a very similar case in an AI that was being used to recognise faces. A PhD student was about to start working on it for her research... until it wouldn't recognise her face. After going to the company that made it they found that the data they had used to train it to recognise faces was heavily skewed towards white masculine faces. In this case they actually retrained the entire AI using a diverse set of data and the issue was fixed in the end.

So yeah, AI are free of vanity and can be useful. But we still have to be wary if they are biased due to how they were built or the data they were trained on.

dkb123

I suppose  if you trained AI to make the best stock market decisions, then there wouldn't be much point in creating a market as it would always make money 
but to make a market there has to be someone losing money otherwise it would not work

WelshBlue

With every advent of new technology I'm mindful of this song ... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ALdL8oV_sY&ab_channel=MadFranko008