Fictional Intelligence

At the Learning Technologies Conference last week, there was a lot of discussion both in conference sessions and in the general social chat, about AI, Artificial Intelligence, in HR, L&D and OD. It's a maturing 'science', with an increasingly well-understood potential and some well-demonstrated examples. However, this post is not about that.

Image: Patricia Hebert

This post is about how science fiction (SF) is ahead of this particular game, and has been for far longer than we've been angsting about it. 

And the good news is that, contrary to traditional expectations of various dystopian futures (well, not entirely), the premise is that humanity has a huge part still to play - not necessarily in its/our classical form perhaps, but in working with and, in some cases, as part of the collaborative whole. OK, in many cases, we may not have been altogether willing participants initially (and that's more about some humans' inhumanity to some other humans, than anything else), but it's our basic humanity which acts as the conscience and the ultimate arbiter of how 'the machines'/AI work/will work.

In his keynote talk on Day 2 of the conference, Daniel Susskind (@danielsusskind) shared John Searle's Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal from February 2011, after IBM's Watson computer beat two human competitors in the TV game show 'Jeopardy' - "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703407304576154313126987674). His premise is that Watson doesn't think, it computes. By extension therefore, we could say that Watson doesn't care that it won Jeopardy.

But we care. And because we care, we can moderate, influence and thereby work with 'the machines'. We just have to learn to appreciate the value and insight they can bring to our work, so that we can learn to humanise the outcomes and realise the benefits.

To finish, just to say our reading doesn't always have to be entirely business or professionally focused for us to be able to draw out some analogous insights. Sometimes, it can just be for our own entertainment. If you'd like to escape into some recent great SF I've read which kinda supports my earlier points, whilst also being rattling good reads (Warning: Some war/violence, some human/animal hybrids, some human/machine over-familiarity), I can recommend the following (all available on Amazon): 

"Autonomous" - Annalee Newitz

"Dogs of War" - Adrian Tchaikovsky

"Ghosts of Tomorrow" - Michael R. Fletcher

Any other Fictional Intelligence recommendations please?

We're only little - and our time is short!

This is one of those blogs where the title's been looking for the story.  I think I might just have cracked it...

I came up with the title as a tweet when I finished a book of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world short science fiction stories on my #kindle.  @dougshaw picked it up and tweeted favourably on my turn of phrase - and that got me thinking more deeply.  Why had I enjoyed this apparently depressing set of stories so much?  And what had triggered my apparently eloquent phraseology?

For someone who's always worked in and thrived on communication and people related activities, I've always held  fairly negative views about the human race and its long-term future.  We seem to have a built-in self-destruct driver, which historically has lead us into war, famine and ecological melt-down and I think our time is nearly up - maybe not immediately, but it's coming.  So reading that collection of short stories satisfied my sense of righteous schadenfreude - we're gonna get what we deserve!

'Cos, here's the thing; on a cosmological/interplanetary timescale, we ain't been around that long.  This big, old, world of ours has been orbiting our sun for billions of years, and the evolution of life hereon has taken millions and millions of those years (sorry, Creationists)!  We've emerged fairly quickly and, ecologically, we seem to be doing an excellent job of ensuring that we're not going to be around for much longer.  I guess the main message in these stories was, it's not the end of the world - it's the end of humanity!  The world will go on, in whatever state we leave it, and will change again and again and again...

So, you  see, we're not so big and we're not that clever.  We're only little - and our time is short!

Sorry about that.

PS: I actually think that there is much to love about us humans; that we can do remarkable things and show astonishing creativity, compassion, generosity, mindfulness and tenacity.  That's why I'm in Learning and Development. It's gotta be worth trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible.