[Coda]

What's good about AI?

Well, first off, since AI is a computer, everything that computers are good at are things that are good about AI: An AI doesn't get bored. An AI can do repetitive tasks very very quickly. An AI can work with HUGE amounts of information. Computers are cheap compared to manual labor.

Then specifically to real-world AI: AI can find relationships between things and use those to make useful predictions about properties of those things. AI can learn from its mistakes.


What's bad about AI:

I mentioned that AI can learn from its mistakes, but the hard part is TELLING the AI that it did in fact make a mistake. It's very easy to train an AI in a biased way -- I've heard it said that "machine learning is like money laundering for bias".

Also, machine learning AI is ridiculously hard to analyze. You can't look at an AI's code to understand how it makes its conclusions. This also means that the only way to fix an AI that isn't coming to the right conclusions is to either throw away its data and start over, or flood it with new data and hope it learns the right conclusions from it.

AI (whether machine learning or not) is limited by its input and its knowledge. It doesn't have creativity or ingenuity or inventiveness to figure out how to deal with an unexpected problem.

At the moment, humans are still better than AI at finding interesting things in massive amounts of unstructured data. Teaching a computer how to drive a car is a lot harder than it sounds because humans are aware of SO MUCH about the world around them that we take for granted. We are insanely good general-purpose pattern matching engines. Computers can outperform us on some specific pattern matching tasks (ironically, AIs are better than humans at solving distorted-text CAPTCHAs), but especially when it comes to identifying features of images... we're REALLY GOOD AT IT.


What's irrelevant about AI:

The threat of industrialization putting people out of jobs isn't actually a bad thing, nor is it a new thing. Every disruptive technology has shifted things around in the job market, but people are resourceful and will find new things to do. New technologies create new fields for jobs and enable people to do jobs that they couldn't have done before. New technologies also have a tendency to reduce the cost of living by making products cheaper, so people get more leisure time because they don't have to work as much to afford what they need. And when people don't have to work as much, that opens up room for more jobs for other people.

Obviously that sounds idealistic, and it is, but it isn't the disruptive technologies that cause problems in the job market -- it's population growth, with more people wanting jobs than the market (technology or no technology) can actually support.