For thousands of years, people have been fascinated with artificial intelligence. In ancient mythology, the Greek god Hephaestus was so skilled with his hammer that he built a giant bronze mechanical man called Talos to protect Europa in Crete from pirates. Thousands of years later, in 1817, Mary Shelley grappled with artificial intelligence (AI) when she wrote Frankenstein. Even more recently, the classic 1927 futuristic film Metropolis featured the robot named Maria who cared for the children and ultimately drove the city to rebellion.
While myths and science fiction have stirred the imagination to consider the potential (and potential horrors) of artificial intelligence, philosophers have struggled to define the very nature of human intelligence. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that our “reason is nothing but reckoning.” He concluded that we are just the sum of our memories, suggesting that maybe these memories could be coded to mechanical intelligence.
Several centuries later in the 1960s, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus criticized this idea of mechanical intelligence. He wrote several books on the subject. One of the most famous was What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, which was first published in 1972. His key argument was that our unconscious human instincts could never be captured with formal rules.
Movies like The Terminator warn us about how easy it might be to create an intelligent digital media strategy network like Skynet that could extinguish our species through a simple binary miscalculation. Silicon Valley celebrities have argued whether artificial intelligence will be our greatest achievement or the ultimate cause of human extinction.
Mythology, science fiction, and philosophy make the topic of artificial intelligence fascinating. However, when you start to look at how artificially intelligent machines do what they do, it’s hard to be sure whether to scream or yawn. On the one hand, some displays of artificial intelligence are extraordinary. It’s amazing to take a ride in a self-driving car. On the other hand, most modern AI focuses on classification. You have a machine classifying millions of photos, videos or audio files. That’s not the kind of technology that motivates you to build an underground bunker or start smashing robots.
Certainly artificial intelligence has enormous potential. But we tend to like to judge things based on their performance, not their potential. So far, artificial intelligence has performed very well. The availability of massive data sets over recent years has given machines new food to find out more about us and the world in which we live. Machines are able to identify patterns in data that humans can’t perceive and would probably never to think to look for. But there’s still an enormous gap between this level of performance and human intelligence.
There’s also an enormous gap between the threats posed by artificial intelligence and human nature. Certainly AI carries practical and ethical challenges. But the first round of the challenges will be less about the ethical implications of creating sentient beings and more about our responsibilities to each other. Think of it as less like The Terminator and more like the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York. When the movie came out unemployment among 16-to-24 year-old males was at 84%. It imagined New York as a compassionless lawless urban jungle that had to be converted into a prison. Our ethical obligations to each other will dog us long before any existential threats from rogue robots.
The first challenge posed by AI will almost certainly be how to support the people whose skills will be obsolete through automation. What will we do with the tens of millions of truck drivers, cabdrivers, retail workers, machine operators and accountants? They won’t all become programmers, yoga instructors, personal trainers, YouTubers and artists.
It’s much more likely that these socio-economic challenges with automation will eventually eclipse our concerns about machines outsmarting humans. It won’t be about a supercomputer taking control of a robot army and turning it against the human race. Instead it will be about the automated burger flipper that took your nephew’s job at Steak and Shake. After all, he may have needed that job to help pay for college.
You should be aware of these challenges as you start to think about the impact of artificial intelligence. But this book isn’t about grappling with these socio-economic challenges. It’s about opportunities. Specifically it’s about business opportunities. To find the best business opportunities, you need to better understand AI as a tool.
If you think about it, some of the top businesses didn’t succeed because they were first to market. Apple didn’t build the first music player. Google wasn’t the first search engine. These companies succeeded because they understood the scope of the tools and technologies and how to apply them to current and future business needs.
While myths and science fiction have stirred the imagination to consider the potential (and potential horrors) of artificial intelligence, philosophers have struggled to define the very nature of human intelligence. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that our “reason is nothing but reckoning.” He concluded that we are just the sum of our memories, suggesting that maybe these memories could be coded to mechanical intelligence.
Several centuries later in the 1960s, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus criticized this idea of mechanical intelligence. He wrote several books on the subject. One of the most famous was What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, which was first published in 1972. His key argument was that our unconscious human instincts could never be captured with formal rules.
Movies like The Terminator warn us about how easy it might be to create an intelligent digital media strategy network like Skynet that could extinguish our species through a simple binary miscalculation. Silicon Valley celebrities have argued whether artificial intelligence will be our greatest achievement or the ultimate cause of human extinction.
Mythology, science fiction, and philosophy make the topic of artificial intelligence fascinating. However, when you start to look at how artificially intelligent machines do what they do, it’s hard to be sure whether to scream or yawn. On the one hand, some displays of artificial intelligence are extraordinary. It’s amazing to take a ride in a self-driving car. On the other hand, most modern AI focuses on classification. You have a machine classifying millions of photos, videos or audio files. That’s not the kind of technology that motivates you to build an underground bunker or start smashing robots.
Certainly artificial intelligence has enormous potential. But we tend to like to judge things based on their performance, not their potential. So far, artificial intelligence has performed very well. The availability of massive data sets over recent years has given machines new food to find out more about us and the world in which we live. Machines are able to identify patterns in data that humans can’t perceive and would probably never to think to look for. But there’s still an enormous gap between this level of performance and human intelligence.
There’s also an enormous gap between the threats posed by artificial intelligence and human nature. Certainly AI carries practical and ethical challenges. But the first round of the challenges will be less about the ethical implications of creating sentient beings and more about our responsibilities to each other. Think of it as less like The Terminator and more like the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York. When the movie came out unemployment among 16-to-24 year-old males was at 84%. It imagined New York as a compassionless lawless urban jungle that had to be converted into a prison. Our ethical obligations to each other will dog us long before any existential threats from rogue robots.
The first challenge posed by AI will almost certainly be how to support the people whose skills will be obsolete through automation. What will we do with the tens of millions of truck drivers, cabdrivers, retail workers, machine operators and accountants? They won’t all become programmers, yoga instructors, personal trainers, YouTubers and artists.
It’s much more likely that these socio-economic challenges with automation will eventually eclipse our concerns about machines outsmarting humans. It won’t be about a supercomputer taking control of a robot army and turning it against the human race. Instead it will be about the automated burger flipper that took your nephew’s job at Steak and Shake. After all, he may have needed that job to help pay for college.
You should be aware of these challenges as you start to think about the impact of artificial intelligence. But this book isn’t about grappling with these socio-economic challenges. It’s about opportunities. Specifically it’s about business opportunities. To find the best business opportunities, you need to better understand AI as a tool.
If you think about it, some of the top businesses didn’t succeed because they were first to market. Apple didn’t build the first music player. Google wasn’t the first search engine. These companies succeeded because they understood the scope of the tools and technologies and how to apply them to current and future business needs.
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