Many online articles and discussions exist about the good and the bad of AI, and about the consequences such a kind of tool could have on the world of work, as well as the harm that could derive from this technology.
Maybe many of these arguments are due to a lack of understanding of what these systems are; also, the name of the tool itself (Artificial Intelligence) brings even more confusion among the non-tech-savvy, who are the majority. Most of the arguments, in fact, revolve around this technology as a potential substitute for human intelligence, which it is not. To add confusion, we also have important stakeholders in the field who, for their own eventual interest, pretend in their declarations not to know that we are not facing an intelligent golem that could eventually replace or supersede humans.
AI tools are, in fact, “nothing more” than very expensive, resource-consuming, fantastic tools to access and interpolate information. Too often the main value brought by these systems is not even noticed: in the last 30 years we queried the web by entering keywords and fetching related documents presented by a search engine such as Lycos, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Google and so on; using these new information retrieval engines, we can interactively ask about what we need and get in-depth answers straight on the interface, eventually asking for more clarification, provided that there is an underlying dataset for what we are asking about.
This represents simply a revolution in the education and research fields, where a student can have a virtual teacher ready to answer every question and to go in depth, providing explanations in different forms until the concept is conveyed and acquired by the student. This is also true for someone doing DIY or research in every possible field. I found myself learning about the radio communication system between the Apollo spacecraft headed toward the moon and the receiving system on Earth; “we” dove into details about frequencies, the problems with the pointing of the antennas, rotation of the Earth compared to the position of the spacecraft, backup and redundancy systems, reaching an incredibly high level of detail. It was literally (almost) like having a chat with a technician responsible for that complex system: that would have been simply impossible to achieve with a standard search engine without embarking on research that could have lasted weeks, fetching and organizing a good amount of different documents and looking for the specific answers to my questions.
In short, we are facing a tool that represents a leap in the potential for reaching knowledge for a single human. Of course there are issues about these kinds of systems: who owns and manages them, whether or not they will be fed with the right information, and whether they will be given for free and why (given their enormous costs). All in all, nothing new if compared with the advent of the web for the masses in the ’90s, or more generally with any other revolutionary technology.
As usual, it is all about the use we make of technology. Little did we know, to say, when the web was introduced in the ’90s that it would have been turned into a giant advertising mall, or when Web 2.0 kicked in in the early 2000s that the world’s data centers were on the verge of being filled with kittens and selfies and user profiles to be sold to marketers.
As it usually happens, the many mistakenly look at the finger pointing to the moon.
Bob Young.
