I was at a conference today and one of the segments was on AI (shocking). There were a few speakers, including a guy from Microsoft and a start up providing AI products to big pharmaceutical companies and another from an educational AI business. Bit of a dot com vibe. Everyone is an AI user and expert now.

It reconfirmed my previous belief that AI is an important productivity tool that will obviously replace a lot of tedious jobs but that it is not real intelligent. It might give the right answer 90% of the time if you ask an easy enough question, or set it a basic high volume task. But it needs human intelligence to direct it and train it. Therefore, if the data source is from the internet, the results will be questionable. However, in a controlled organisation environment using quality data and with intelligent direction from an experienced and skilled human, it can be incredibly powerful.

I can see how it can crunch through large amounts of data and accelerate advancement in all kinds of fields. But it’s just a tool to assist intelligent humans. It’s going to be hard to trust AI with important decisions. I don’t see any evidence that AI can help with wisdom and judgement.

I really wanted to ask these AI experts about national security and AI. If AI enables making all kinds of things (including advanced weapons) exponentially easier, then rouge states will become more dangerous sooner. Hopefully Western military can maintain their military superiority. Maybe I’ll ask AI how we’re got.