Todd

Software Security TechLead

May 31, 2017

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say not only do I not feel like A.I. is going to be as significant as they're making it sound, I think computers themselves even are going to be on the down eventually. You can call me crazy, but I just have this feeling that there will be something even better than computers as we know them right now. One of the big problems with computers is that they're very "hackish."

What we do is we turn everything into a numbers game, and the way we compensate for doing that is building faster processors and just crunching numbers faster. This very dumb unfortunately because nature isn't a numbers game. In fact, numbers are human-made constructs to help us better understand the world around us, but IMO, they should not dictate and limit how we do things. It's very easy for people, especially us in IT and the media, to overglorify these things, but the reality is computers came out of seemingly nowhere and started taking over, what's to stop the next big thing that we're not all thinking of?

Uncle Bob Martin, one of the oldest and most experienced programmers on the planet, who has been coding for about 60 years now and written Clean Code, the Agile manifesto, etc... Even stated that they're having a very hard time making computers faster and he believes they've already plateaud. Not to mention, there hasn't been a single new programming construct introduced in over 40 years.

We're also seeing weakness after weakness, exploit after exploit, vulnerabilities like crazy, etc.... Software definitely has its flaws. It's going to be like an airplane - it'll still be around but it won't be anything too crazy.

I agree that AI may be hyped up a little too much. Intelligence isn't linear, but multi-dimensional (more about this here). As another example, ATMs failed to put bank tellers out of a job, and in fact the number of bank tellers increased. Exponential growth in AI is going to require exponential growth in data (more data allows more complex algorithms--the general guideline is that you need 10 data points for every parameter/VC dimension in your algorithm) and exponential growth in compute power to train your algorithms on that same data. But Moore's law is dead after 50 years (Intel's tic-toc strategy has become to tic-toc-toc).

The development of the silicon chip + Moore's law exponential growth (transistors double every 18 months) transformed many industries and disrupted many jobs, but the rate of disruption was manageable. It's hard to imagine AI disruption going to exceed the previous levels of disruption without something better than Moore's law growth (algorithm complexity has to double << 18 months). I'm not saying that there'll be no job disruption at all, I'm just saying that the rate job disruption isn't necessarily going to be much larger than in past. Is it even possible to say that the job disruption rate is going to apply equally across all countries?

Lastly, people should be aware that there's lots of reasons to hype up AI. It's always nice for startups to see their valuations go sky high... same for the stock price of listed companies. AI hype helps people get more support (or funding) for their AI ideas and projects. People also get to sell more copies of your book, call themselves an AI guru, etc.

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