I recently attended a meeting of a
small group of technology and domain experts. The meeting was to focus on a
problem statement and dissect it under different technology and domain lenses. Each
person was from a different field and bought a unique expertise to the table. It
was evident they had spent years in their focus area assimilating and growing
their knowledge. Very quickly I had realized ‘expert’ was too modest a noun to
describe them. The meeting which had started as an amazing experience had soon
turned into a humbling experience for me.
I have been thinking about that
experience for the last few days and seem to have found a correlation between
that meeting and Expert systems/Artificial intelligence-Machine learning
(AL-ML) system. That meeting to me resembled an expert system building pattern where
experts pour their knowledge and experience to solve a complex problem.
As I thought more, my mind started
drawing random parallels between that meeting and expert systems and generally wandered
into the direction of the expert systems. Every expert system (or an AI-ML
system) when introduced, first sparks a sense of bewilderment. It is approached
with a set of presumptions and questions, bordering disdain. As the expert
system proves and grows with promise, the disdain soon turns into an
admiration for the expert system. The user starts appreciating the system and
its potential. Often the admiration might even give way to distrust. A distrust
might arise from a question of job security or individual well being or even
from a question of ultimate survival. Take the example of Self-driving cars;
they were initially struck down as a work of fiction. But as the self-driving
promise held ground, it turned into an admiration. Distrust too found way in
the hearts of the car enthusiasts who hated the very thought of sitting in the
back seat and not at the wheel. Isn’t it
a similar pattern for most AI-ML systems, maybe with only slight variations?
But one stand out feature among all these systems is the sense of humbleness
that they evolve. Once you accept and understand the power of expert systems,
they undeniably lead to a sense of humbleness. The user is humbled at the sheer
talent of these systems.
As my mind searched for parallels,
some things started falling out - the non-parallels. The non-parallels in terms
of human emotions, or spontaneous thoughts, or even simple non-verbal
expressions. Are there parallels to these? Even two humans can rarely experience
the same levels of emotion. Any level of admiration, distrust or even humbleness
that the AI-ML systems evoke, cannot replace these simple non-parallels. It is
these subtle non-parallels that defines us as humans, and separates us humans
from the AI-ML systems. Maybe at some
point in the future when the AI-ML systems have significantly evolved, they too
might hit a point of humbleness. The humbleness that might arise in them from the
fact that non-parallels exit between them and the humans.
~Narendra V Joshi
No comments:
Post a Comment