Skip to main content

Working with AI - Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller ***

There have been plenty of books on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will impact our lives from the dire warnings of Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction to Melanie Mitchell's in-depth exploration of the technology Artificial Intelligence, but in Working with AI, Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller give us a new viewpoint that is interesting, if a little worrying. If we compare writing about AI with the Star Wars movies, it's as if almost every AI book I've read so far, like the films, has been written from the viewpoint of the rebels. But this is a book that solidly takes the viewpoint of the empire.

Unfortunately, although it covers a fair number of AI applications, it's also written more like a business book that a popular science/technology book, and as such it's pretty dull. Anyone familiar with the business book genre will recognise that deadly moment when you get to a box that's a case study. It's going to be boring. This book contains 29 case studies, one after the other, by the end of which I was quietly groaning.

However, there were definitely some insights to be gained here. In that range of case studies, there were several standouts. The main thesis that Davenport and Miller are proposing is that, despite some issues, artificial intelligence will not destroy vast swathes of jobs, but will instead improve them by taking on the boring bits, not (on the whole) displacing humans, but working alongside them. Perhaps the best example of this was the robotic weed picker, which made a farm worker's job more interesting and did something that, frankly, no human really wants to do. Admittedly, in this kind of application there would be fewer humans employed, but it feels like a genuinely beneficial change.

What was worrying, though, in the dark side orientation of this book was that there was very little consideration of some of the other potential negatives of AI - in fact, it felt the authors were almost celebrating some of these. Several case studies highlighted this approach, for example one on using AI to support a help desk, a couple on making decisions on issuing insurance policies and mortgages and one on policing.

The help desk example felt particularly insidious. The idea was that the software monitored conversations between customers and the help desk to improve the quality of interactions. But apart from a passing mention of it, the authors don't really acknowledge the Big Brother aspect of software checking your every word, rating your performance and pushing you into conformity with the required groupthink. Similarly, we heard about all the advantages for the companies using software to decide if customers should be given an insurance policy or mortgage, but not the well-documented problems raised by opaque machine learning systems using entirely unsuitable data to reject individuals. The policing example is an infamous one, and the authors had to acknowledge there have been serious problems with such systems producing racist results and making particular areas even worse than they were before, but merely say this has to be avoided, without giving any evidence that this is even possible to do.

I'm sure Davenport and Miller thought they were doing something useful in focusing on the ways that AI will not necessarily replace human workers but rather would augment their abilities. But I don't think it's possible, as was done here, to ignore some of the other dangers of AI like lack of transparency, misuse of data, surveillance and more. You have to take the view across the board. 

I'd suggest this book is important reading to get a balanced picture of AI, if you can cope with the kind of mangled business-speak sentences that crop up, such as 'She works particularly at the top of the prospect funnel, trying to move leads along in the sales process and operationalize a disciplined prospecting and selling process.' The book does illustrate a few examples where having an AI helper can be genuinely beneficial to workers. And plenty more where it can benefit companies to the disadvantage of either workers or customers. This is surely valuable data, whether you side with Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more