Declan Foster informs us about demystifying artificial intelligence (AI) and
his book Humology: How to Put Humans Back at the Heart of Technology.
Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) can inspire fear thanks to
their uncanny creative powers and their apparent ability to communicate with
humans.
Author and consultant Declan Foster, however, says theres no need to be
afraid; AI isnt nearly as smart as you might think. The author and change
manager talks about his book on humology; or the art of putting people
back at the centre of the tech revolution.
Declan has spent two decades managing change in large organisations, and
hes now spear-heading a campaign to demystify technologies like AI. He is
co-author with Joanne Griffin of the book Humology: How to put Humans Back
at the Heart of Technology. The word humology is a mash-up of the words
human and technology.
The AI-powered tool Chat GPT has been in the news a lot; and its given rise
to fears of human job losses. Declan says we need to understand how AI
actually works. He says a tool like Chat GPT doesnt actually understand
human language, at least not in the way that humans do.
When asked a question, it trawls vast amounts of data at high speed, and
churns out the most likely answer according to a mathematical formula:
"Thats just a piece of machine learning. And all machine learning is, is
just maths and statistics on steroids. Its not magic."
Tools like Chat GPT cant do anything on their own. They dont have a mind
of their own and they are there to serve us, he says:
"When its used properly, its just there to augment humans and not replace
them."
Governments take the regulation of AI seriously, especially in light of the
popularity of art generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. These
tools create photos and illustrations in response to a text prompt; using
images scraped from online sources. They can also generate deep fakes, by
re-purposing images of real people and places and creating new pictures
which are fake, but which look real:
"You can use a text-to-image software like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion
and you can see that that might actually create an awful lot of problems. So
they are certainly concerned in the US about how deep fakes or fake images
can actually be created, and it might be used, perhaps during the
presidential election."
Declan talks about recent developments which should help people to be able
to tell if what they are looking at is real:
"Over the weekend, in fact, some of the leading lights in AI met with Joe
Biden and they volunteered to put in what they are calling a digital
watermark in these images. So now youre able to see, they can tell, like
embed it in the code this image is AI-generated. You know, is it fake or
is it a real image?"
The scheme is voluntary at the moment, but its a start, Declan says.
Theres no internationally agreed legal framework governing the use of AI,
but we have learned from past mistakes, and Declan says there are reasons to
be hopeful:
"Weve learned as a society that we didnt do a good job of preparing for
social media, and legislating for it. I think people are aware we dont want
to make that same mistake twice with AI. I can see from some of the work
that Im doing at the moment and studies that Im doing over at Oxford, that
theres a real focus now on ethical applications of AI."
Declan has high hopes that AI can help solve some of the great problems of
our age:
"Im actually quite positive on AI. I think it has the capabilities to solve
even some of these existential crises that were faced with, like climate
change and food shortages, etc. I think AI will play a huge role in that.
But we just have to use it carefully."
When it comes to new technologies, find out whats really going on, before
you rush to judgement, he says:
"I also think that everybody needs to be informed what AI is, so that they
can have informed conversations about whether theyre for it or against it
you need to understand what it is."
Humology: How to put Humans back at the Heart of Technology by Declan Foster
and Joanne Griffin is published by Rethink Press.
RTÉ LifeStyle.
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