Although this post is about AI and maybe I should have put it under my Computing posts I felt this is really about my thoughts on the AI industry and its effect on us rather than the technology.
I will put my hand up and say that I am a fan of AI, however if I was a football fan I would be the first to say that some teams are pretty awful and I feel its the same with AI, most of the implementations are pretty dreadful.
You would have to have been in a cave three miles under the surface of Mars not to have heard about the impact of AI on us and how every thing we see and do now has some AI aspect to it.
Why is this? Is it for the good of mankind to create a better world for all of us as we are led to believe?
Well maybe, and there certainly are some really good people out there trying to do this, but we have to accept that the boom in AI has largely been for economic reasons.
A lot of these benefits are about removing the human element from work, obviously humans are at least in the developed world quite expensive, they are unreliable (sickness) and they talk back (unions), AI and AI based machines remove these issues.
In my 50 years of computing experience before we had AI we obviously did analysys on data to determine trends and predict outcomes etc. to make better decisions, the tools were comparitively basic and more importantly the computing resources were much more limited. Now we have great tools and we have enormouse computing resources.
It truth if you think about it it is in the interests of most industries to remove the human element from their process and that is why they are pushing AI so much. Governments and CEO's will state that this will not replace jobs but will just enhance the work people do. I do not believe this to be true in all cases. If I have a warehouse from which I supply Teddy Bears, if I can pick, pack and ship all of my products using machines then I will do that simply because the costs are reduced, workforce problems reduced and more profit for me and my shareholders. I cannot see how I can give my employees a more enriched employment when I no longer need them.
Obviously there will be many jobs enhanced, Doctors and Surgeons will have much more capability to do there job better and in fact the whole health and care industry should be enhanced, whether it be an AI monitoring your health or telling you when to take your drugs, keeping you company from a mental health perspective etc., Investors will be able to trade and do deals much more effectively but many jobs will just dissapear and it will not be possible to take all of the unskilled labour force and retrain them.
Train drivers, Lorry drivers, Taxi Drivers will all be replaced with automated transport systems. This will happen with absolute certainty and the governments need to plan for this to happen in the not to distant future with acceptance of such things as 'Universal Basic Income' along with more stringent population control as we can only support a smaller workforce population. They need to do this now and not wait until the problems of unemployment, poverty and even starvation hit the worlds population which I am sure will also be able to fit a war or two in there somewhere as unrest occurs.
AI is inevitable and I truly believe it can bring some significant benefits to the world but it will have some significant economic effects and they need to be recognised and addressed now.
No one knows how far AI will go as it will find solutions to problems we did not know we had and provide services that we did not know that we needed in the same way as the Mobile phone has become something we never imagined.
AI should be embraced but governments should not stick their heads in the sand and should recognize the problems that will occur and address them before they become overwhelming. Denying these inevitable problems will just make matters worse whereas addressing them may well bring that better world we aspire to.