Confidence in AI

Half-watching the local news, my ears pricked up when Carol announced that ‘The University of York has set up a living lab to reassure people about Artificial Intelligence’. The screen was filled with pictures of clever people interacting with semi-humanoid robots, with friendly faces and smiling eyes (the robots that is). 

I don’t know if this was just the BBC being lazy, thinking that robots will make good television or if its reporters really think that this is what AI is and will be like. I suspect the former as the broadcaster must already be using huge amounts of AI in its production and scheduling. The robot is a useful metaphor for human/machine interaction. Remember the Jetsons? Perhaps not.

The York Press had a slightly different take, saying that: ‘A NEW £45 million centre is set to be opened in York aimed at boosting public confidence in new technologies such as AI. The University of York will launch the Institute for Safe Autonomy, a ‘living lab’ that provides research and development space for autonomous systems – the big networks that make up the Internet, operating on the ground, underwater and in the air.’ AI is only to be a part of the story. No doubt it was inserted to attract the attention of the media. It worked.

The transformation of our lives through AI will be much less transparent, with a rapid shift from things we thought that people were doing to automated and ‘intelligent’ processes. This may seem dystopian yet it is not all bad. Many of the tasks that AI will undertake are repetitive and transactional by nature, the very things that technology is better at than humans. Others will be tasks that require an enormous amount of sustained concentration, again not a particular human strength.

Take medicine for example. A visit to your GP could be transformed if the doctor had a full comprehension of your notes. AI could do this in advance of your visit by reading all your previous notes and highlighting points of interest or patterns of behaviour. This would allow the doctor time to think deeper about the symptoms you are presenting and spend more time improving the lives of the patients, the very thing they came into medicine to do.

What York University is doing is amazing but please, less of the robots.