Thought-provoking article on AI

The New York times (who else? – they really seem to be all over this machine intelligence stuff lately) has published an Op-Ed by Jaron Lanier, a research scientist at Microsoft.  The article twists the typical conversation about AI on its head, saying that one of the effects of AI is that people are turning more machine-like rather than machines turning more human-like, and in the process we are essentially losing our soul.

Pretty heavy stuff, for sure.

I’ll focus on one interesting snippet in the article:

We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.

This passage kind of struck a personal chord for me. In my former job, we worked on a system called TCAS, which is a collision avoidance system mandated by law to be installed on all aircraft around the world of a certain size. Certainly, all the commercial passenger jets in the United States have this system installed.

This system could easily be called artificial intelligence – it uses sensors to detect approaching aircraft and issues commands, based on decisions made by algorithms, to the human pilot who would nominally be expected to execute the commands faithfully. The system was developed because of an act of Congress after a series of tragic mid-air collisions in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s. The system “went live” in 1992, I believe, and there are international bodies containing very dedicated and smart people continuing to work on upgrading it since then.

Where it gets interesting, and related to the author’s quote above, is where the human fits in with this system. For example, pilots are supposed to always follow TCAS’ commands, unless they have overriding visual evidence to support a different decision. The reason is that multiple TCAS systems will actually coordinate actions between the two planes if necessary to separate them.

Now, where it gets really interesting (and tragic) is when despite the rules, one or both pilots choose to take actions opposite to what TCAS tells them to do, as they did in Uberlingen Germany in 2002. In this case, one of the pilots obeyed the commands of the controller, and as a result, there was a mid-air collision and 71 people died.

While there are indeed technical solutions (CP112E) in this case – which I personally worked on verifying – it brings up a case where human judgement was faulty and the algorithm was correct, and the result of the human “double check” caused harm.

In general, I am actually in the author’s camp that handing over your free will to a machine should at least give you pause, and I don’t dispute that we are slowly becoming more machine-like. I support all the creative/independent thinkers out there, because I think it’s getting tougher for people to trust your judgement in the presence of the Social Network.

But I also believe that in some situations, like in Uberlingen, it’s not always a bad thing to accept a machine’s advice. Unquestionably, the human element introduces “noise” which waters down the effectiveness of algorithms such as TCAS.  I predict it will be the great ethical and legal struggle of my generation to find out where to draw the line.  While it would be great if it were always an individual choice (such as shutting down your Facebook account), I can see examples similar to Uberlingen coming down the line in other life or death situations like in medicine and for safety systems in other contexts where something will have to give.

I seem to be more optimistic than the author, however, on the macro level. I think the slow revolution of society being caused by the AI all around us is causing us to think about our lives and society more logically which will ultimately lead to more social justice.

Either that or you’ll get the computer from Wargames, not sure.