AI Outside The Bubble

As Baldur Bjarnason points out, the Apple Crush and Google “Dear Sydney” ads were created inside tech bubbles, insulated and disconnected from the real world outside.

My background is in Computer Science and Data Science. Advanced data analytics, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, are part of what I do every day. I am well inside the bubble. Most (but not all) of the people I interact with on a daily basis are inside the bubble. And most of them tend to reflect (to paraphrase Alan Greenspan) an “irrational exuberance” with respect AI.

It’s not that they’re wrong. There are some very good use cases, not only in technology but in the business, law, humanities, and yes even in the arts and everyday life. But as we have seen, these solutions are by and large not yet “ready for prime time.”

What bothers me most is not some dystopian future where Earth is ruled by machines, but this recent enthusiasm to bolt AI onto everything that moves.

When troubleshooting a problem, particularly difficult and complex ones, there is sometimes a tendency to become frustrated and take what many call a “shotgun” approach: try anything and everything, often in a very unsystematic way, and hope that something takes hold. That is how AI is unfolding today.

The reason, at least in part, is that the most vocal AI champions are also inside the bubble. Their perspective is skewed by the fact that there is a new shiny tool in the toolbox, the “AI hammer,” and everything out there looks like an ”AI nail.” (This problem is not unique to AI, technologists often suffer from this particular variety of myopia.) The result is a swirling, cacophonous vortex fueled by pundits’ unrealistic expectations, massive capital investments by tech titans, and zealous evangelism by AI Stans.

Some day, the state of the art will catch up with the expectations in some of these areas. Until then, I hope that those of us inside the bubble will step outside once in a while, touch some grass, and get some perspective.