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When even Elon Musk – normally a champion of the human ability to improve its condition through material progress – backs the robots, we know we’re in trouble. But barely a year ago, back in 2017, he became fear-monger-in-chief of the artificial-intelligence apocalypse. “What’s going to happen,” he said, “is robots will be able to do everything better than us … I mean all of us.”
But a lot can happen in two years. A report just published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers should go some way to calming such hysteria. It argues that AI will create slightly more jobs in the UK (7.2 million) than it displaces (7 million). So rather than lamenting an apocalyptic tomorrow in which we are ruled by our robot overlords, a more useful way to think about the future would be to consider how we can interlace the strengths of machines with those of humans.
John Giannandrea who left his role as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, to head up AI at Apple, is already doing so. “There’s just a huge amount of unwarranted hype around it right now,” he says, “[much of which is] borderline irresponsible.” We shouldn’t be using it to match or replace humans, but to make “machines slightly more intelligent — or slightly less dumb”. He isn’t dismissing the potential of computers to radically alter the way we work, but is thinking about the ways it will do so in a slightly more nuanced fashion.
He knows that the better we understand the differences between the way people think and the way in which machines calculate, the better we can assess how to work with them. For example, unlike machines, humans typically lean on a variety of mental rules of thumb that yield narratively plausible, but often logically dubious, judgments. The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls the human mind “a machine for jumping to conclusions”.
Machines using deep-learning algorithms, in contrast, must be trained with thousands of photographs to recognise kittens— and even then, they will have formed no conceptual understanding of cats. Small children can easily learn what a kitten is from just a few examples. Not so machines. They don’t think like humans and they can only apply their ‘thinking’ to narrow fields. They cannot, therefore, associate pictures of cats with stories about cats.
But, counterintuitively perhaps, the tasks humans find hard, machines often find easy. Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik summarises what is known as Moravec’s Paradox: “At first, we thought that the quintessential preoccupations of the officially smart few, like playing chess or proving theorems — the corridas of nerd machismo — would prove to be hardest for computers.”
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SubscribeProfessor Giesecke, much lauded in some quarters, of course says we will get however many cases we’re going to get, regardless. Lockdown just defers deaths rather than avoiding them. In which case, track and trace simply keeps the daily death count low enough not to frighten the natives.
The Government has been a little creative with testing stats but that became inevitable once the media decided to use them as a stick to beat the Government with, rather than as a route to understanding.
More millennials have passports than driver’s licenses… A single round trip flight from LA to London has nearly the same carbon footprint as driving a Toyota Camry for a year. But boomers are the “gas guzzlers”. ha.
We millennials are insufferable, self-serving hypocrites, ravenous for virtue-clout, pathologically hanging over a pool of water staring at our own reflections”except unlike Narcissus, we’re actually aware the face we are hopelessly in love with is our own, and we just don’t care.
Anyway, I’m off to the next march. where’s my placard
No doubt we should have a competent test and tracing system in place. NHSX does need to up its game and get the APP working and secure. Why not make it mandatory to download for anyone over 18 and under 70 and avoid quarantining international visitors?
Personally the trade off of the state knowing where I am and if I have tested positive that I am self isolating is a small price to pay to get the economy back on track – I fear people in general dont really understand what kind of economic hardship we are heading for and potentially more general social unrest if we dont get the country back to work…..
Now is the wrong time to be complacent as to where we are heading
Test, trace and isolate by consent is a wish that probably won’t come true. The so called successful countries in the East realised this and have draconian controls written into law that a western democracy simply wouldn’t accept. The country at large and to some degree fuelled by a facile media have turned from “can’t release the lockdown it isn’t safe” to “release the lockdown and move to 1m distancing” almost in the blink of an eye. It’s almost as if the country has has a road to Damascus moment where the damage to the economy is concerned. Is the cure now worse than the disease?
The control measures could be based on risk assessment and anyone who is even on nodding terms with the ONS data will know that the risk factors are around age and underlying health concerns in the main. Almost half of deaths occur to to over 80’s and the risk to under 19’s is negligible. The old and vulnerable (who may not be in the workplace anyway) can be locked down and the remaining population can be allowed to go about their business aware of the risks.
Looking at the ONS data today it is highly likely that excess deaths will be below the 5yr average when the next data is published next Tuesday and it already is in London. Similarly the ONS suggest the infection numbers are 1 in 1750. If we accept that as an average then where I live in the North East the population of Newcastle Gateshead Sunderland and the surrounding areas is ~1.9m. So if I go for a walk I have to find one of the 1085 infected people and get close enough to catch it in a huge geographical area. If Karl Friston is correct then that number becomes 216.
I’m surprised that the report from Cog-UK on the genomes of Covid-19 hasn’t been more widely publicised or discussed. Maybe it doesn’t fit the MSM narrative.
It remains to be seen how courageous the government will be.
In the ’50s and ’60s my mother worried that television would fry my brain and make me go blind, and that rock-n-roll would turn me into a juvenile delinquent. The never-ending narrative.
Isolate the vulnerable and let it go through the working age population in a controlled manner – minimises deaths and economic impact. whilst getting us to a position where we have herd immunity faster so the vulnerable can come out of isolation earlier. When you look at how few new cases there have been in London for weeks now despite protests and other mass gatherings it would seem London is already pretty close despite antibody results being a bit disappointing – there is clearly more to immunity than just antibodies.
Just look at the Swedish public health data.
https://experience.arcgis.c…
There the epidemic has virtually disappeared with only 10 new intensive care admissions a day and a similar number of deaths, down from a peak of around 50 ICU admissions and 100 deaths per day. All accomplished without prolonged and excessive infringement of civil liberties.
200 people under 60 have died in Sweden out of a populace of 10 million. That’s ~3 per 100,000 people in the young and middle-aged segments of the populace and actually more than two thirds of those deaths were in people over 50. No wonder the young people are taking to the streets.