Surviving Machine Intelligence

It was a pleasure to be an audience and listen to Karthik speak about his new book and the future of
AI, Human Guide to Staying Ahead.

Karthik Hosanagar is a Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School and has been recognized as
one of the world’s top 40 business professors under 40.

Summary of talks – Today the term AI is overly used and abused. But the men who are shying away
from AI today are the ones similar to the first men running away from fire.

I guess many of us have seen the movie The Imitation Game. Yes, I am referring to Alan Turing, the
man who is often referred to as the father of modern computing and AI. He wrote a paper, back in
50’s arguing can machines think. Maybe not then, but today we can consider otherwise.

Karthik beautifully walked us through the milestones. Early iterations in the ’70s to ’90s saw the use
of an expert system approach. Here engineers hard-coded every rule in the system. This failed as it
lacked human-like decision making. Today, newer technologies like machine learning, deep learning
use statistical pattern matching. AI using Statistical approach has been in the market for long now
but the real difference to the industry is seen in the past 5 years because the kind of the data being
digitally collected today did not exist earlier. AI is data hungry system and as per Karthik, we are still
in the data collection stage.

So when will AI become as intelligent as humans? The learning method AI is currently using is closest
to how a human child learns, by experiences and the blend of supervised and unsupervised learning.
And as per him, we are not far, when computers will become more intelligent than humans. It is just
a matter of time that they will get smarter and will invent what is left to be invented. There was also
a reference to reinforced AI. The systems will generate its own new data and further learn from it
which no human brain can do.

There have been instances where AI systems play games like chess. Where they played some
complex moves which the human brains cannot even process.

AI is currently touching the life of an individual in a large way and it is going to play a major role in
healthcare, transport, supply chain sectors, even the decision making in the courtrooms. As per
statistics, 30% of buying decision on Amazon are currently influenced by its recommendation AI.
Karthik also tried to explain the typecast error recommendation AI is creating because of human
response to these systems leading to filter bubble.

As per Uber, they will be able to predict the demand well in advance. Eg. When a particular event
will end. There will be higher demand in that region. They will try to increase the supply of cabs in
that area by incentivizing the drivers.

While we discussed the AI in transportation and driverless cars. Karthik explained that AI in this
technology has matured, but the problem still lies with its coexistence with legacy systems i.e.
humans and their unpredictable behaviour.

Yes, we will lose jobs to AI. Also, AI can get creative to an extent, for eg. it can create new patterns
by decoding the existing pattern styles.

But It will be hard for AI to do a high level of creativity. Because AI works on past patterns, and to do
something extraordinary, it will have to break rules.
So what will men do if AI starts doing all these things? Humans will have a lot of free time which will
make them involved in creative activities.

There are two ways for men to survive in times of AI. First is to be in the business of building AI and
second is to get more creative and empathetic.

We have long surpassed the era where we frame the rules of AI, but the ethics of AI. So who owns
this data and who takes the responsibility of building a framework of AI with consciousness?

Coming back to Alan Turing Test, it was a test created by him to distinguish between humans and
machines, where machines try to imitate the humans. We are on the verge where machines will pass
this test.

“The ability to decide over values will make humans different over machines” – exclaimed Narayan
Murthy sir sitting in the audience.

following is the link to a trailer made using AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJEzuYynaiw