AI is a Big Fat Lie

The Logical Fallacy of Believing in AI’s Inevitability

  
The thing is, "artificial intelligence" itself is a lie. Just evoking that buzzword automatically insinuates that technological advancement is making its way toward the ability to reason like people. To gain humanlike "common sense." That’s a powerful brand. But it’s an empty promise. Your common sense is more amazing – and unachievable – than your common sense can sense. You're amazing. Your ability to think abstractly and "understand" the world around you might feel simple in your moment-to-moment experience, but it's incredibly complex. That experience of simplicity is either a testament to how adept your uniquely human brain is or a great illusion that's intrinsic to the human condition – or probably both.

Now, some may respond to me, “Isn't inspired, visionary ambition a good thing? Imagination propels us and unknown horizons beckon us!” Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001, made a great point: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I agree. However, that does not mean any and all "magic" we can imagine – or include in science fiction – could eventually be achieved by technology. Just 'cause it's in a movie doesn't mean it's gonna happen. AI evangelists often invoke Arthur’s point – but they've got the logic reversed. My iPhone seems very "Star Trek" to me, but that's not an argument everything on Star Trek is gonna come true. The fact that creative fiction writers can make shows like Westworld is not at all evidence that stuff like that could happen.

Robots on HBO’s Westworld. Well, at least two are robots; I’m not caught up.

Now, maybe I'm being a buzzkill, but actually I'm not. Let me put it this way. The uniqueness of humans and the real advancements of machine learning are each already more than amazing and exciting enough to keep us entertained. We don't need fairy tales – especially ones that mislead.

 

Sophia: AI’s Most Notorious Fraudulent Publicity Stunt

 
The star of this fairy tale, the leading role of “The Princess” is played by Sophia, a product of Hanson Robotics and AI's most notorious fraudulent publicity stunt. This robot has applied her artificial grace and charm to hoodwink the media. Jimmy Fallon and other interviewers have hosted her – it, I mean have hosted it. But when it "converses," it's all scripts and canned dialogue – misrepresented as spontaneous conversation – and in some contexts, rudimentary chatbot-level responsiveness.

One of three fashion magazines that have featured the robot Sophia on their cover.

Believe it or not, three fashion magazines have featured Sophia on their cover, and, ever goofier and sillier, the country Saudi Arabia officially granted it citizenship. For real. The first robot citizen. I'm actually a little upset about this, 'cause my microwave and pet rock have also applied for citizenship but still no word.

My pet rock.

Sophia is a modern-day Mechanical Turk – which was an 18th century hoax that fooled the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin into believing they'd just lost a game of chess to a machine. The mannequin you can see behind the desk there would move the pieces and the victims wouldn't notice there was actually a small human chess expert hidden inside the cabinet.

The Mechanical Turk

In a modern day parallel, Amazon has an online service you use to hire workers to perform many small tasks that require human judgement, like choosing the nicest looking of several photographs. It's named Amazon Mechanical Turk, and its slogan, “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” Which reminds me of this great vegetarian restaurant with “mock mock duck” on the menu – I swear, it tastes exactly like mock duck. Hey, if it talks like a duck, and it tastes like a duck...

Yes indeed, the very best fake AI is humans. In 1965, when NASA was defending the idea of sending humans to space, they put it this way: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” I dunno. I think there's some skill in it. ;-)

NASA thinks humans are a good alternative to AI. Most of my friends are human.

 

The Myth of Dangerous Superintelligence

 
Anyway, as for Sophia, mass hysteria, right? Well, it gets worse: Claims that AI presents an existential threat to the human race. From the most seemingly credible sources, the most elite of tech celebrities, comes a doomsday vision of homicidal robots and killer computers. None other than Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and even the late, great Stephen Hawking have jumped on the "superintelligence singularity" bandwagon. They believe machines will achieve a degree of general competence that empowers the machines to improve their own general competence – so much so that this will then quickly escalate past human intelligence, and do so at the lightning speed of computers, a speed the computers themselves will continue to improve by virtue of their superintelligence, and before you know it you have a system or entity so powerful that the slightest misalignment of objectives could wipe out the human race. Like if we naively commanded it to manufacture as many rubber chickens as possible, it might invent an entire new high-speed industry that can make 40 trillion rubber chickens but that happens to result in the extinction of Homo sapiens as a side effect. Well, at least it would be easier to get tickets for Hamilton.

There are two problems with this theory. First, it's so compellingly dramatic that it’s gonna ruin movies. If the best bad guy is always a robot instead of a human, what about Nurse Ratched and Norman Bates? I need my Hannibal Lecter! "The best bad guy," by the way, is an oxymoron. And so is "artificial intelligence." Just sayin’.

Hannibal Lecter

But it is true: Robopocalypse is definitely coming. Soon. I'm totally serious, I swear. Based on a novel by the same name, Michael Bay – of the "Transformers" movies – is currently directing it as we speak. Fasten your gosh darn seatbelts people, ‘cause, if "Robopocalypse" isn't in 3D, you were born in the wrong parallel universe.

The book, “Robopocalypse.” A movie based on the book is forthcoming.

Oh yeah, and the second problem with the AI doomsday theory is that it's ludicrous. AI is so smart it's gonna kill everyone by accident? Really really stupid superintelligence? That sounds like a contradiction.

To be more precise, the real problem is that the theory presumes that technological advancements move us along a path toward humanlike “thinking” capabilities. But they don't. It's not headed in that direction. I'll come back to that point again in a minute – first, a bit more on how widely this apocalyptic theory has radiated.

 

A Widespread Belief in Superintelligence

 
The Kool-Aid these high-tech royalty drink, the go-to book that sets the foundation, is the New York Times bestseller "Superintelligence," by Nick Bostrom, who's a professor of applied ethics at Oxford University. The book mongers the fear and fans the flames, if not igniting the fire in the first place for many people. It explores how we might "make an intelligence explosion survivable." The Guardian newspaper ran a headline, "Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’," and Newsweek: “Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out,” both headlines obediently quoting Bostrom himself.

Bill Gates "highly recommends" the book, Elon Musk said AI is “vastly more risky than North Korea” – as Fortune Magazine repeated in a headline – and, quoting Stephen Hawking, the BBC ran a headline, "'AI could spell end of the human race'."

In a Ted talk that's been viewed 5 million times (across platforms), the bestselling author and podcast intellectual Sam Harris states with supreme confidence, “At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are, and once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves.”

Both he and Bostrom show the audience an intelligence spectrum during their Ted talks – here's the one by Bostrom:

Nick Bostrom, positioned at the rightmost position of his own intelligence spectrum.

You can see as we move along the path from left to right we pass a mouse, a chimp, a village idiot, and then the very smart theoretical physicist Ed Witten. He's relatively close to the idiot, because even an idiot human is much smarter than a chimp, relatively speaking. You can see the arrow just above the spectrum showing that "AI" progresses in that same direction, along to the right. At the very rightmost position is Bostrom himself, which is either just an accident of photography, or proof that he himself is an AI robot.

In fact, here's a 13-second clip of the moment that Bill Gates first brought Bostrom to life.

Oops, that was the wrong clip – uh, that was Dr. Frankenstein, but, ya know, same scenario.

 

A Falsely-Conceived “Spectrum of Intelligence”

 
Anyway, that falsely-conceived intelligence spectrum is the problem. I've read the book and many of the interviews and watched the talks and pretty much all the believers intrinsically build on an erroneous presumption that "smartness" or "intelligence" falls more or less along a single, one-dimensional spectrum. They presume that the more adept machines become at more and more challenging tasks, the higher they will rank on this scale, eventually surpassing humans.

But machine learning has us marching along a different path. We're moving fast, and we'll likely go very far, but we're going in a different direction, only tangentially related to human capabilities.

The trick is to take a moment to think about this difference. Our own personal experiences of being one of those smart creatures called a human is what catches us in a thought trap. Our very particular and very impressive capabilities are hidden from ourselves beneath a veil of a conscious experience that just kind of feels like "clarity." It feels simple, but under the surface, it's oh so complex. Replicating our “general common sense” is a fanciful notion that no technological advancements have ever moved us towards in any meaningful way.

Thinking abstractly often feels uncomplicated. We draw visuals in our mind, like a not-to-scale map of a city we're navigating, or a "space" of products that two large companies are competing to sell, with each company dominating in some areas but not in others... or, when thinking about AI, the mistaken vision that increasingly adept capabilities – both intellectual and computational – all fall along the same, somewhat narrow path.

Now, Bostrom rightly emphasizes that we should not anthropomorphize what intelligent machines may be like in the future. It's not human, so it’s hard to speculate on the specifics and perhap it will seem more like a space alien's intelligence. But what Bostrom and his followers aren't seeing is that, since they believe technology advances along a spectrum that includes and then transcends human cognition, the spectrum itself as they've conceived it is anthropomorphic. It has humanlike qualities built in. Now, your common sense reasoning may seem to you like a "natural stage" of any sort of intellectual development, but that's a very human-centric perspective. Your common sense is intricate and very, very particular. It's far beyond our grasp – for anyone – to formally define a "spectrum of intelligence" that includes human cognition on it. Our brains are spectacularly multi-faceted and adept, in a very arcane way.

 

Machines Progress Along a Different Spectrum

 
Machine learning actually does work by defining a kind of spectrum, but only for an extremely limited sort of trajectory – only for tasks that have labeled data, such as identifying objects in images. With labeled data, you can compare and rank various attempts to solve the problem. The computer uses the data to measure how well it does. Like, one neural network might correctly identify 90% of the trucks in the images and then a variation after some improvements might get 95%.

Getting better and better at a specific task like that obviously doesn't lead to general common sense reasoning capabilities. We're not on that trajectory, so the fears should be allayed. The machine isn't going to get to a human-like level where it then figures out how to propel itself into superintelligence. No, it's just gonna keep getting better at identifying objects, that's all.

Intelligence isn't a Platonic ideal that exists separately from humans, waiting to be discovered. It's not going to spontaneously emerge along a spectrum of better and better technology. Why would it? That's a ghost story.

It might feel tempting to believe that increased complexity leads to intelligence. After all, computers are incredibly general-purpose – they can basically do any task, if only we can figure out how to program them to do that task. And we're getting them to do more and more complex things. But just because they could do anything doesn't mean they will spontaneously do everything we imagine they might.

No advancements in machine learning to date have provided any hint or inkling of what kind of secret sauce could get computers to gain “general common sense reasoning.” Dreaming that such abilities could emerge is just wishful thinking and rogue imagination, no different now, after the last several decades of innovations, than it was back in 1950, when Alan Turing, the father of computer science, first tried to define how the word "intelligence" might apply to computers.

Although the well-received 2014 movie The Imitation Game focused on his work on cryptography during Word War II, I’ve always known Alan Turing more as the father of both computer science and the philosophy of AI.

 

Don’t Sell, Buy, or Regulate on “AI”

 
Machines will remain fundamentally under our control. Computer errors will kill – people will die from autonomous vehicles and medical automation – but not on a catastrophic level, unless by the intentional design of human cyber attackers. When a misstep does occur, we take the system offline and fix it.

Now, the aforementioned techno-celebrity believers are true intellectuals and are truly accomplished as entrepreneurs, engineers, and thought leaders in their respective fields. But they aren’t machine learning experts. None of them are. When it comes to their AI pontificating, it would truly be better for everyone if they published their thoughts as blockbuster movie scripts rather than earnest futurism.

It's time for term "AI" to be “terminated.” Mean what you say and say what you mean. If you're talking about machine learning, call it machine learning. The buzzword "AI" is doing more harm than good. It may sometimes help with publicity, but to at least the same degree, it misleads. AI isn’t a thing. It’s vaporware. Don’t sell it and don't buy it.

And most importantly, do not regulate on "AI"! Technology greatly needs regulation in certain arenas, for example, to address bias in algorithmic decision-making and the development of autonomous weapons – which often use machine learning – so clarity is absolutely critical in these discussions. Using the imprecise, misleading term "artificial intelligence" is gravely detrimental to the effectiveness and credibility of any initiative that regulates technology. Regulation is already hard enough without muddying the waters.

This article is based on a transcript from The Dr. Data Show.

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Eric Siegel, Ph.D., founder of the Predictive Analytics World and Deep Learning World conference series and executive editor of The Predictive Analytics Times, makes the how and why of predictive analytics (aka machine learning) understandable and captivating. He is the author of the award-winning Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, the host of The Dr. Data Show web series, a former Columbia University professor, and a renowned speaker, educator, and leader in the field. Read also his articles on data and social justice and follow him at @predictanalytic.