AI is just a tool

 The past two weeks, there has been a lot of talk about artificial "intelligence" or AI.  Recently, CBS's Scott Pelley was interviewing Google CEO Sundar Picai, this exchange took place:

“You don’t fully understand how it works and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?” Pelley asked.

“Let me put it this way, I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either,” Pichai responded.

Pichai, in other words, didn't really answer Pelley's question. How our brains work is not really in question. But of course Pichai should understand how his AI works or he shouldn't put it out there. No product should be put on the market if the producer doesn't understand it.  But, it brings up a fundamental issue with AI, which is that it isn't "intelligent" at all.

Today at the American Thinker Robert Arvay has the right attitude about AI. In an article entitled Artificial Intelligence is no big deal - until it is. Everyone seems to be trying to scare us with the idea that an AI might become smarter than us and enslave us, or kill us all off. Of course if one did decide to kill us off, who would manufacture the parts needed to repair the machines?

There is a lot of hype regarding artificial intelligence, known also as A.I. That hype has been fed by old movies such as Colossus: The Forbin Project and by less fictional but still spectacular predictions of a technological singularity.

The Forbin Project is science fiction, and like the best of science fiction, it has a kernel of truth that makes it worth thinking about as a precaution. It speculates that computer networks may become a cruel master of humanity. The technological singularity is a theory, not a wild guess, that predicts that computer intelligence may suddenly, and the key word is suddenly, spring out of human control. Taking these two together, one can understand why there is so much nervous attention being paid to A.I.

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According to the Forbes article linked above, "the scale, scope and complexity of the impact of intelligence evolution in machines is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. ... [There is] no historical precedent and [it] is fundamentally disrupting everything in the human ecosystem." That may sound overly dramatic, but Forbes articles are known more for sober analysis than for hyperbole.

That said, we need to tap the brakes in our examination of A.I. I am not the first to point out that computers are not genuinely intelligent. Not only do they mimic intelligence, but they may even give the outward appearance of being alive and conscious. They are none of that. They are "stuff," wires and diodes, etc., made by people. In that sense, they are like any other tool. Yes, they are complex, too complex for most of us to understand, and getting more complex all the time. Even so, the real threat comes not from computers and A.I., but from the people who build, program, and use them.

People worry that AI is too fast. Of course, that is why we employ computers in the first place, because they are much faster than the human. Calculating things by hand is incredibly tedious.  Man has constantly invented ever more powerful ways to calculate from logarithms to slide rules to calculators and computers.  But as Arvay points out, they are not really 'intelligent." For all the gee whiz factor, computers do three things that man has always done. First is word processing, second is calculating numberical data (spread sheets) and performing database functions. Think the old phone book. I think our real problem with using AI is to weed out the biases of the system. AI may be able to assemble various facts, but it still takes a human to determine the truth.  After all, it is just a tool.  Use it wisely.

It behooves us, then, to recognize A.I. as the useful tool it is — to use it, but not depend on it for making the moral decisions that only we, not it, can make. Instead of the artificial variety, we must use our natural, God-given intelligence.