My phone can now understand me but it’s still an idiot when it comes to understanding what I want. We have both the hardware capacity and the software capacity to solve this right now. What we lack is the social capacity.
We are currently in a dumb state of personal automation. I have Google Now enabled on my phone. Every single month Google Now reminds me of bills coming due that I have already paid. It doesn’t see me pay them, it just sees the email I received and the due date. A creature of habit, I pay my bills on the last day of the month even though that may be weeks early. This is the easiest thing in the world for a computer to learn. But it’s an open loop system and so no learning can happen.
Earlier this month [Cameron Coward] wrote an outstanding pair or articles on AI research that helped shed some light on this problem. The correct term for this level of personal automation is “weak AI”. What I want is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) on a personal level. But that’s not going to happen, and I am the problem. Here’s why.
Like most people, my phone is now part of who I am. Although I spend hours a day using an actual desktop computer (that’s the kind where the monitor and keyboard aren’t one integrated part of the computer) much of my life passes though a 5.2″ touchscreen. Google is always watching but for now it’s relegated to a small portion of what is going on. It sees those monthly bill notices I previously mentioned because I use gmail, but it doesn’t watch my browser activity close enough to see me pay them.
Everything in life needs an impetus to happen. If there isn’t a closed loop on my bill payments it’s no surprise that I get deprecated reminders about them. This means my current automation is annoying rather than assistive. It can’t see everything I do.
In many cultures there is a social norm that you don’t stare at people. That is to say, there are times when it is and isn’t appropriate to look at people; there is a maximum amount of time you can continue gazing upon them; and the rules that make this work are a game of moving goal posts.
Yet almost all humans are capable of, and do learn this game. Even strangers who have never met you before can quickly recognize when you need help and if they should offer it or not. This is the keystone to unlocking useful personal AI. It’s also an incredibly difficult task.
A much easier method is to watch absolutely everything the user does. This makes a lot more data available but it’s super creepy and raises a ton of ethical concerns. Being observed the majority of the time is unprecedented — there’s no human-to-human paradigm for this type of watchfulness. And the early technology paradigms have not been going well. Just last week authorities in Germany recommended that owners of a doll called “Cayla” destroy the microphones housed within. The doll’s microphone is always listening, routing what is heard through a voice recognition service with servers outside of the country.
Creepiness aside, privacy is a major issue with allowing an system to watch everything you do. If that information is somehow breached it would be an identity theft goldmine. Would your AI need to know to shut itself down anytime you walk into a public restroom, hospital, or other sensitive environment? How could you trust that it had done so on every occasion?
My mind also jumps to a whimsical scenario where your personal AI gets a bit too smart and decides to blackmail you (a Douglas-Adams-like thought… I will try to keep this discussion on the track of what is plausible). More likely, once your personal assistant knows you well enough and proves it can get you to do your work more efficiently it’ll be promoted from your assistant to your manager. Are you still an effective team?
Machine learning is the key to doing amazing things. But gain a bit of understanding of how it works and you immediately see where the problem lies.
