Comment – AI, cheese and all that..

Regular readers will be delighted to know that yours truly is taking a break from commenting on significant world events this week. Frankly, it’s exhausting and bewildering.

How about some cautionary tales regarding AI?

You must have been under a stone if you haven’t heard how the world’s economy is going to be rocked (pun intended) by the integration of AI into everyday life. If you are at odds to know what AI is, think of that coverall suite of technologies broadly called precision farming, well AI is a similar broad brush description for lots of learning tools, which can manipulate large sets of data and reach conclusions, alright so far? OK, then some can ‘scape’ websites and recycle its findings as hard facts.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Recently Google had to pull their SuperBowl advert in the States due to a spurious fact that 50-60% of the worlds cheese was Gouda.. Work out where that so called fact came from… The full story is here.

Also the global tech stocks collapse of the last week or so was driven mainly by a cheaper competitor entering the marketplace. Quickly followed by the shrieks of one of the major established players crying ‘theft’ of their IP, kind of misses the point of much of AI. It is deliberately using other peoples data and facts, ie it’s designed to churn through mountains, acres (?), terabytes of third party information, lots of it in on the internet in order to reach its machine learning conclusions. There’s a handy explainer here.

I don’t know much about AI, but I do know that whilst it does have great potential, at the moment, like any new technology there are going to be many bumps in the road, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in our world.

Perhaps in the shorter term we should be more concerned about the ‘right to repair’ debate.  Australian farmers have made it to the headlines this time.

Have a good week.

Andy