Authors Electric

  It’s been a bit of a grumpy month for me. I’ve had the dubious pleasures of AI foisted on me at work, and spent far too long looking for an off switch for it. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really bought into the hype about AI. I’ve always thought it’s a bit like 3D TV – quite niche, and ultimately not that useful. Because, fundamentally, it’s not really intelligence – it’s just a cleverly programmed algorithm with a vast trove of data to fall back on for pattern matching. I tried to be fair when evaluating it, but gave up after a day when it confidently informed me that the word ‘strawberry’ contained the letter ‘R’ four times, and showed me a picture of a raspberry. It also insisted there were twenty-five years in half a century. Sigh. Despite this, I’ve had a stream of people gushing over it. The most ironic comment was that it would ‘write my emails for me’ – all I had to do was proof read them and correct them… Suggesting it would be as quick to just writ...

  I was listening to the annual BBC Reith lectures the other day on the radio. The theme this year is AI, something I have quite a bit of interest in, albeit usually in a rather cynical way. See, from what I know, having researched this for both a previous book and a forthcoming one, it’s not really ‘intelligence’ as we would define it, artificial or otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very clever models these days, that appear to demonstrate progress is being made in the pursuit of genuine artificial intelligence, and some of these advances in technology are very useful, but at the end of the day, they’re all just an algorithm. The computer (or in the case of most of these systems, the server farms) are just running through a set of rules. Machine learning? Just a huge dataset and the application of statistics and the laws of probability. Neural networks? Multiple passes over data with increasing levels of granularity to reduce the sample size to the requir...