Making Sense of AI. Anthony Elliott

Making Sense of AI - Anthony  Elliott


Скачать книгу
of deeper technological shifts in the scale of economic organization and social relations worldwide. This can be discerned, argue transformationalists, in the rise of advanced automation, supercomputers, 3D printing, Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. AI technologies, including robotics and advanced digital systems that deploy deep learning, neural networks, machine decision-making and pattern recognition, have given rise to an era of intelligent machines which can increasingly sense their own environments, think, learn and react in response to data. The rise of neural networks, a kind of machine learning roughly modelled on the human brain, consisting of deeply layered processing nodes, has been especially consequential for the powering up of AI-based economies and societies. Today, fewer and fewer things are removed from the impress of AI, and every phenomenon, including private life and the self, seems influenced by self-learning algorithms to its roots.

      Box 2.1 Sceptics

      1 Sceptics show some recognition that AI is sweeping through industries, enterprises and public life, but AI is not viewed as revolutionary. On the contrary, ‘no significant change’ is the motto.

      2 For many authors of a sceptical persuasion, AI as a transformative power is recast as little more than marketing hype or a myth.

      3 Rather than a transformed world economy powered by AI, sceptics advance a business-as-usual model comprising technological advances on the one hand, and adaptation by the labour force on the other hand.

      4 There is an emphasis upon workplace change as involving the twin forces of people and machines, employees and technology.

      5 It is implicitly acknowledged that AI poses a risk to some jobs (mostly routine, unskilled work, according to sceptics), but in general the position advanced is that AI will create more jobs than it destroys.

      6 There may be some spillover from AI breakthroughs that impact society, culture and everyday life – especially the globalizing forces of communication. Nonetheless, AI is primarily a technological process which principally impacts the economy in limited and partial ways.

      7 For many of a sceptical persuasion, traditional economic power is paramount and the actions of national societies are important too. Accordingly, the globalizing dimensions of AI are treated as contingent on these economic and national state factors.

      Central to this transformationalist perspective is an emphasis on the social relations impacted by AI. That is to say, the technologies associated with AI are understood to reshape not only institutions and organizations but also identities and intimacies. Another way of making this point is to say that the AI revolution is as much about entertainment as it is about the economy, as much about meaning and morality as it is about money and manufacturing. For lifestyle change is likely to be of key importance in the spheres of both professional and personal life when assessing the impacts of AI, or so argue transformationalists. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee write of these massive changes in The Second Machine Age: ‘Computers started diagnosing diseases, listening and speaking to us, and writing high-quality prose, while robots started scurrying around warehouses and driving cars with minimal or no guidance.’7 Brynjolfsson and McAfee capture well the idea that digital transformation is not only about the economy, industry and corporate life, but crucially also about sociality, everyday life and power. The advance of AI is, in a word, generative. The digital revolution creates different kinds of work and different sorts of skills and gives rise to different ways of living from those of even the very recent past.

      I view AI . . . as a good thing once we can get through the transition. People’s jobs will be more interesting because all the robotic repetitive stuff will be done by machines. Things that can be done remotely will be done remotely and that will allow us to do things where we actually have to be together. So, ultimately, I think it will be a very, very good thing.9


Скачать книгу