Читать книгу Outsmarting AI - Brennan Pursell - Страница 13

Only death is inescapable—and taxes.

Yes, your organization can certainly do well enough without AI, as you have in the past, but you place yourself at a competitive disadvantage if you reject the best available tools. We are not trying to stoke FOMO (fear of missing out). You want to solve your business problems, alleviate the pain points, and boost your productivity and performance.

AI applications are spreading like wildfire through almost every sector of the economy. The smoke of real disruption can’t be missed. Some AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings leave older solutions behind in the dust. Some are just smoke and mirrors.

AI will not control everything. It is a human tool. It will never tell you how to live a good life or run your business well. It’s not going to take over the world.

Yes, there are plenty of imaginative people who claim that it will one day, but they should listen to Geoffrey Hinton, who in 1986 laid the path for AI development with his backpropagation algorithms. (I will go over these in chapter 2.) In an interview in 2017, Hinton flat-out denied that backpropagation will lead computers to learn independently, without supervision, as small children do. “I don’t think it’s how the brain works,” he said. “My view is throw it all away and start again.”^[5]

Why would anyone want to try and replicate human intelligence in a machine anyway? Aren’t we people maddeningly unpredictable enough? Let’s just get machines to do more of the backbreaking, boring work. This trend has been going on for roughly three centuries. Let’s keep it up, keep our heads, and do it responsibly.