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Monday 9 January 2017

AI reporting is mostly fake news

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Interesting piece on artificial intelligence (AI) in The Register. It claims that -

Almost everything you read about AI is fake news. The AI coverage comes from a media willing itself into the mind of a three year old child, in order to be impressed.

For example, how many human jobs did AI replace in 2016? If you gave professional pundits a multiple choice question listing these three answers: 3 million, 300,000 and none, I suspect very few would choose the correct answer, which is of course “none”.

Similarly, if you asked tech experts which recent theoretical or technical breakthrough could account for the rise in coverage of AI, even fewer would be able to answer correctly that “there hasn’t been one”...


...Out in the real world, people want better service, not worse service; more human and less robotic exchanges with services, not more robotic "post-human" exchanges. But nobody inside the AI cult seems to worry about this. They think we’re as amazed as they are. We’re not.

6 comments:

Sackerson said...

More middle-class jobs ready to be lost through outsourcing via the Web - e.g. accounting, law preparation work done by Indians. And then there's computer programs for both those, presumably more work done by fewer people.

Anonymous said...

Who pays and who benefits is the real driver. If you can dress flim-flam up as 'Driving Change' or some other breathless marketing-speak then you are halfway home. No-one knows what Intelligence is and so more or less anything can be dressed up as AI. An ideal stamping ground for those looking to peddle dross for the price of silver.

Demetrius said...

I always thought that AI was when I pretended to have read a book. Either that or if I did read one and pretended to understand it.

A K Haart said...

Sackers - true. I assume the guy is writing about autonomous systems which take over what was previously a human activity. Seems like a fine line.

Roger - I agree, much of it is oversold. Quantum computing may be flim-flam too.

Demetrius - my old physics teacher said that if you don't understand a book then neither does the author.

James Higham said...

Fake news is the new buzz feed.

A K Haart said...

James - it is, although this kind of exaggeration has been with us for a long time.