Book Review: 'Faking It'

Given the self-serving nature of many articles about artificial intelligence, this new book - 'Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World' - is an excellent primer for the uninitiated about what AI is, how it is being used and what implications it holds for many fields and, indeed, for humanity itself.

The author, Toby Walsh, is one of the world’s leading researchers on AI and is currently a professor in the field at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Professor Walsh is both sceptical about the money-driven hype around AI and alarmed at how willing many people are to be deceived by its increasingly sophisticated applications.

His key point is that artificial intelligence, as the name suggests, is ARTIFICIAL and different to human intelligence. The clue is in the title of the book. It’s about 'faking it'. While these algorithms can perform amazing feats of computation they are nevertheless still machines.

“Machine-learning algorithms typically require thousands of examples to recognise a single concept,” Walsh writes. “Humans, on the other hand, can learn from a single example. Machine learning transfers poorly outside the training set.”

And it's the demonstrable lack of the most under-rated human virtue of 'common sense' or an ability to see information in its full context that is so often the undoing of AI applications.

“Narrow intelligence isn’t on a continuum to general intelligence.," Walsh writes. "Success at playing world-class chess with AI didn’t provide us with any progress on AIs that might fold a shirt, understand a metaphor in a Shakespearian sonnet or discover a new antibiotic.”

In other words, Walsh is concerned about inflated and over-hyped expectations about what artificial intelligence can and can’t achieve. While its supposed ‘creativity’ in simulating art, design, music and literature is making collective jaws drop around the world, this is still fakery.

Essentially, without the aforementioned common sense, the sophisticated AIs that technology companies are building will remain, at best, idiot savants - superhuman at a few narrow tasks, but lacking in all-round general intelligence.

The worry, however, is that many of us are losing their ability to spot the difference. And that has potentially catastrophic consequences.

Highly recommended.