Country Parson has a relatively small subscriber base, yet gets a considerable number of casual readers who find it somewhere on the internet. My analytics tell me that the country from which they read C.P. most frequently are the Commonwealth nations. Oddly enough there are a number of readers from places one would not expect: India, Pakistan, Taiwan, China, Oman, Poland, etc. Of course they are not readers of C.P. at all, they are computers searching the web for key words and syphoning off snippets for their controllers to sift through for intelligence of one kind or another. The process that Country Parson hopes for is the human conversation between writer and reader – real persons interested in religion and politics.
It brings me to reflections on the recent book by George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room. The purpose of the White House Situation Room is to sift incoming information from all sources to produce briefings needed by the President and presidential staff. Toward the end of the book Stephanopoulos reported an observation from Google’s CEO that dozens of analysts looking through data was a waste of human talent when computers could be programmed to do it faster and cheaper. All it would take is the right algorithm to pick up on unusual deviations from routine background chatter. Today’s advances in AI would enable the computer to learn and adjust on its own faster and more accurately than error prone humans. Google may not be the most reliable source of expert advice given their current problems with publicly available AI tools, but it’s worth thinking about anyway.
What the idea fails to consider, at least for me, is that much of what the analysts do is based on intuition, a feeling that something is different, a hunch, and knowledge of history and conditions not included in information coming into the Situation Room. As an added factor, analysts check each other through conversation about what they think and why they think it. They are also able to adjust quickly to new requests from White House staff that are often far outside the norm. It’s an organic process, analog if you will, that involves constructive relationships between independent persons in a way that computers cannot: at least not now.
Is the organic human approach less accurate and efficient than a computer based AI approach? I don’t think it’s one against the other. AI can sift through enormous amounts of data in a short time looking for relatively obvious anomalies. The slower organic process of human analysts will ferret out nuances outside the realm of algorithms and the limitations of machine learning. Moreover, what’s true for the Situation Room is true for everyday life in every organization: public sector, private sector, non-profit, and social.
Artificial Intelligence, for all its potential for good, cannot replace human wisdom, creativity, imagination, and intuitive problem solving. I have spent years teaching and preaching that you cannot answer a question that has not been asked. What humans can do, and have done for millennia, is to imagine the unasked question and postulate possible answers. That, I suspect, is a unique property of humanity that computers can only imitate superficially.
I don’t want to dismiss the potential value of AI. In time it will be able to do routine data processing and instruct actions that will replace laborious and error proof work now done by computer assisted humans. AI currently available to the public appears to be used more for entertainment or like a toy than anything else. As with any toy or entertainment gizmo the public can manipulate, people are messing with it to produce silly, outlandish and sometimes dangerous outcomes. Hackers have learned how to fool around with its internal algorithms to produce mutations no one expected or wanted. It will take some time for AI to become a reliable, useful tool for the public. In the meantime, governments and corporations are exploring how to use it in ways not available to the public. With fingers crossed we can hope for the best and remain skeptically vigilant.