The View | The real technology threat is already here: big data and e-commerce platforms
We’re not even close in the quest for human-level intelligence in machines
The science fiction hype peddled by researchers and the media always outpaces the technical limitations in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been vastly over rated, yet it is regularly pronounced as the next future shock. The disconnection between popular imagination and reality is dramatic. And the threat of workers being replaced in large numbers by robots is far away and less than the immediate problem of digitalisation and automation.
The idea of modelling a brain through computational neuroscience has been around for a long enough time that researchers claim it is a feasible goal. The quest for human-level intelligence in machines is not only a failure – we aren’t even close.
Yet, the widespread and pernicious misconceptions regarding the potential hazards of AI continue to gain momentum without evidence. It is sensationalised through Hollywood’s fictional apocalyptic films such as Terminator while technologists or futurists feed the spectre of robot overlords.
The reality is that in 2012 Google’s cutting edge research lab Google X claimed it was able to develop a neural network that taught itself how to recognise a cat with 15.8 per cent accuracy. This major advance is supposed to roughly simulate a human brain connection. But, it is nowhere close to being “self-aware”, as was the “Skynet” system in Terminator.
Workers are either underpaid or replaced by automation or cheaper labour in China
A recent Deloitte’s study said that rapid advances in technology and the popularity of online shopping meant that more than 2 million jobs in the wholesale and retail sectors or almost 60 per cent of the current retail workforce – had a high chance of being automated by 2036. But there is a difference between automation and sentient robots.