Lately a term that has been thrown around regularly is A.I. or artificial intelligence. Immediately an image of a robotic boy with the name David appears who is trying find his place in the world or if you prefer the doom and gloom version as that of the film Ex Machina where the machine outsmarts the creator and ultimately results in the death of the lesser humans. Rough right? Well, we’re not there quite yet.
Firstly, let’s define artificial intelligence. When I type 7 to the power of 7 into my calculator and hit the equal sign the number 823543 instantaneously pops out. As I see it, that’s quite clever or intelligent rather and as my calculator is created by man, it’s artificial. So artificial intelligence then. But no, not really.
According to John McCarthy Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. An example of this would be for a computer to play chess and decide what the best next move would be. The challenge lies in the fact that the opponent’s next move is indeterminable. Intelligence is therefore needed in the decision making process.
A.I. becomes of great interest where it can be used to aid or even replace white collar jobs. Like the industrial revolution but the jobs at risk are those of the professionals. So back to doom and gloom then but let’s focus on the positive for now. For one, time consuming activities could be done autonomously and/or even improved. Let’s take risk assessment for example: A couple of years ago you had a personal relationship with your banker, let’s call him Bob, and Bob decided if you would get a loan based on how he felt about you (This is not completely true but Bob had a big say with regards to your loan). Bob made some bad character calls and was replaced by fancy tables and some mathematics as things needed to be standardised. So no more Bob then and a thing called credit score becomes important. The new risk assessment method works well but has a lot of room for improvement as it is very robust and slow to react to changes in real life. Here A.I. would be an improvement as large data sets could be analysed to give a more bespoke product. On top of that the program would learn as data is added to the knowledge base causing alterations and adjustments as needed to output. This also frees up time for you to get to the other aspects of your day to day.
This is all very well and is sure to have a great improvement on the way we conduct business but we will need to proceed with caution as creating something that essentially thinks for itself may have complications. Already we are very reliant on Google for the answers we seek and the knowledge of how the mechanics behind something works is no longer of interest as long as we get to the end result. Being too dependent on something is dangerous as consideration has to be given to what would happen if systems fail. We therefore need to fully understand how A.I. works and use it correctly as a tool to improve efficiency rather than a replacement for a professional’s expertise.