The evidence of artificial intelligence’s (AI) presence is all around us.
To illustrate, let’s go shopping. The barcodes being swiped through the tills may mark the end of our weekly visit, but they are raw material for AI.
Stock control programmes using Big Data on weather and demand trends combine with our swipe to get the right replacement products onto the shelves. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated cameras track purchases and help to identify potential shoplifters. Behind the scenes, AI programmes in Head Office model strategy, market trends, financial planning and much more.
This is a long way from the friendly local store, where there is a personal response to each visit and each transaction. Ordering, stocking, keeping theft down and income up is all down to the shopkeeper. No wonder the march of AI is seen as dehumanising, even apocalyptic.
But this apparently straight replacement of the cheerful shopkeeper by dehumanised AI plays more to our fears of what is being substituted than the reality. AI needs humans to set goals, write the programmes, train the data, check data quality, and interpret the results.
‘Garbage in’ remains ‘garbage out’ and, in a fast-moving world, human judgement is required to keep the garbage out and make sense of what the machine tells us. That includes the answers we get from ChatGPT. Without human judgement, Big Data is just Big Numbers.