AI Collaborator

What’s link between The Twilight Zone and Garry Kasparov? Artificial Intelligence.

Image from Patrick McCabe Makes

 

Set-up

On early morning television, I watched the classic Twilight Zone episode The Brain Center at Mr. Whipple’s (Season 5, Episode 33). The short IMDB description is:

A heartless CEO completely automates his factory and lays off almost all of his workers over the objections of his employees.

The episode presents a depressing view where improvement means elimination of jobs. I am sometimes mistaken for this guy because help people improve their workplace.

Immediately after I listened to this podcast from Harvard Business Review, How AI Is Already Changing Business, (HBR IdeaCast: 586). This interview discusses all of the good things that are happening with AI, and helps us put the technology in perspective by highlighting what it cannot do — that is, create.

Interestingly, both sources come to the same conclusion, as Mr. Serling says:

The point is that, too often, Man becomes clever instead of becoming wise; he becomes inventive and not thoughtful; and sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence.

Game Rules

While Mr. Whipple was trying to integrate automation into his factory, what you really see is ersatz Artificial Intelligence over 50 years before the current conversation. We have been worrying about the machines taking over for a while now, yet we continue to persevere.

On the one hand, we wish that AI would take over some forms of information management, like SIRI or ALEXA. On the other hand, we do not want to become obsolete machines in the next industrial revolution. It seems that we are trying to strike a balance between freeing AI and properly subjugating it to our will.

Win Condition

A colleague of mine is working to create a knowledge base that helps machine operators make associations regarding what the machine is telling us, what I call the telemetry (he calls it by a corporate acronym). The system that we are working to implement is more like that described by Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in his TED Talk, Don’t Fear Intelligent Machines. Work with Them. Kasparov is probably known more for his losses to the machine Deep Blue than for his wins against Anatoly Karpov to become World Champion at the age of 22.

In his TED talk, Kasparov contends that the greatest innovations to come are from a collaboration between people and computers where the collaboration is more or less equal with humans providing the creativity and machines providing the raw processing power.

This is how I expect to win with computers:

I don’t try to automate anything that I cannot already do. I try to automate things that I can do and a computer can do better.

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