WRAL TechWire is teaming with YourLocalStudio.com, a 10-year-old self-described video agency, to launch today what we believe is a riveting, deep, deep dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence. Alexander Ferguson, the CEO and founder of YourLocalStudio, and his team have done a series of in-depth video interviews with thought leaders in the AI field – many of whom are based in the Triangle. It’s part of the studio’s UpTech program. This week’s segment is an interview with AI thought leader Robbie Allen.

UpTech

Welcome to UpTech Report’s series on artificial intelligence. I’m Alexander Ferguson this video is part of our deep dive interview series where we share the wealth of knowledge given by one of our panel of experts. This is the second part of my conversation with Robbie Allen. CEO of Infina ML in Durham, North Carolina. Robbie owns six patents, and has authored eight different books and is a fascinating individual to interview about A.I..

The interview:

  • What is changing in artificial intelligence right now? How it will impact the workforce, and will machines ever be able to complete the same intellectual tasks humans can?

I think voice is very powerful, we’re seeing that with Alexa. I don’t know if even Amazon’s found the killer app necessarily, it’s not like Alexa is driving lots of commerce at this point. And, I know I use it at home to check on the weather and set a timer and things like that, but I would say my usage is pretty limited to a small subset of use cases.

I think there’s some applications in the enterprise to apply voice based interactions. I need help with, you know, instead of calling up a help desk you can call up somebody and maybe that can be an automated system.

Although we all have experience with sort of automated voice systems gone wrong. So I do think there’s a lot of potential for voice. And again, thanks to machine learning, we’re gonna be seeing that over time.

But I don’t think it’s gonna be a voice economy, or everything’s driven strictly out of voice. I think we’re still a ways off from the technology being robust enough to be able to handle that level.

Just in the same way that we’re still a ways off from autonomous cars being robust enough to handle driving any street on their own. So it’s a little bit the same with voice, we can do, for certain use cases you can kind of have a voice system stay in it’s lane and do okay, but if you’re trying to tackle very broad applications, it very easily can get out of whack.

  • What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce?

The goal is not to just take people out of their jobs and fire them. And in fact, most of the time there’s, it’s not the case that machine learning typically automates 100% of a task anyway.


Maybe you can make a job more efficient, so instead of doing five of something in a day, now you can do 20 of something. But again, there’s all sorts of types of tasks that open up with the introduction of machine learning into an organization.

And as well as data processing, and data labeling, and there’s all sorts of things that are gonna be there. So there’s gonna be plenty of work for the foreseeable future.

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I mean, data scientist is arguably one of the hottest jobs in the United States. Everybody wants to be a data scientist it seems. And so that will continue to have strong demand for the foreseeable future.

I won’t say there will be an impact on jobs for sure, it’s hard to say whether it’ll be good or bad. In fact I can see a world where there’s gonna be a lot of new jobs created. Because again, some of the things people aren’t talking about is in order to have machine learning working in a real world environment, and in a production setting, you need somebody that’s kind of keeping an eye on it over time.

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You need somebody that’s helping keeping it trained over time. I refer to those as machine learning assistants. And so for all the jobs that are gonna go away because maybe somebody’s doing a very routine manual task, there’s a new set of jobs that are gonna open up to helping keep the machine learning algorithms trained over time.

The other point I would make is a lot of people rush to judgment about it’s gonna automate jobs. Well there’s a certain volatility to the workforce that’s always present. So sure there’s gonna be some jobs that go away, I suggest first when you do see a job maybe that gets automated away, answer the question should that have ever been done by a human in the first place?

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Because for me, a lot of the jobs that I see that maybe are gonna go away in the near term, they’re jobs that we shouldn’t have people doing them. The only reason we have people doing them is because we didn’t have technology before. If we’d have had technology before we would have said of course we don’t want humans doing, looking at a screen for multiple hours throughout the day to try to find small changes, or try to detect if there’s a knife or a gun in a bag.

That’s just, that’s not something we should have people doing, it doesn’t make use of human talent. And so it’s just now we have capability that may be able to do that in place of a human, and that’s actually a good thing.

  • How should business handle the unavoidable implementation of artificial intelligence?

Well I think it’s being transparent about it. Because again there’s nothing more detrimental to an organization than not really tackling a problem head on and not really addressing it in an open manner, because again ultimately, I don’t think there’s a story for most companies to be worried about here.

There’s not, it’s not gonna be the case that you’re gonna go in and wipe out large portions of your organization due to automation. And again if you are doing that it’s because it was such a routine task that again, the writing was on the wall eventually anyway.

And so ultimately it’s just being open about it. Because eventually there’s gonna be more jobs that come up because of this, as I mentioned the machine learning assistants.

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And so in general I don’t see it as a major issue that most companies really need to worry about. So they shouldn’t really hide from it, they should tackle it head on. I think the biggest thing is just to not be afraid of it.

There’s some people that get nervous, and it’s mostly a perception thing. It’s not a thing actually based in reality. They’re concerned that people are gonna say oh we have a machine learning project, what are you trying to automate me out of a job? When in practice, I just don’t see that.

I’ve been running companies that have been facing this issue since 2010, and I’m just not aware of virtually anybody losing a job due to advanced use of machine learning or data science. And so that tends to be a concern that often people have, again it’s not something that you should avoid, but I think you should address it head on and just be comforted to know that it’s typically not a concern that you’re gonna be wiping out large portions of your workforce.

  • Will machines ever be able to perform any intellectual tasks a human can?

AGI, or artificial general intelligence has been talked about quite a bit and a lot of people are wondering when is it gonna happen? There’s a study that I often cite that happened I think it was 2016 or so where 300 A.I. researchers were asked when will all human activity be automated? Essentially when will we have AGI? And the answers obviously vary, but the average of these 300 experts was more than 100 years from now.

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And for me, I have a hard time predicting something five years from now. If you’re saying somethings gonna happen even 30, 40, 50 years from now, that’s just a guess really.

Again if you go back to what I was saying before with the rate of innovation that’s growing even faster, to be able to predict what the world’s gonna look like in 30 years, I just don’t think is realistic. And so where we’re at today is there’s nothing in the research literature that points to us being able to develop AGI anytime soon.

Now again that’s not to say that it won’t happen eventually, but the notion that we’ll be able to create software or robotics that essentially a sentient, has a conscious, and can think and act on its own, that’s still in the realm of sci-fi right now. And despite everything you hear, and all the people that talk about it, it’s just not a realistic thing right now.

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It’s just a juicy topic that people get really interested in. It kind of ushers in thoughts of Terminator and all of these things, and again I’m not gonna be one to say that it’s impossible, but I’m just also trying to be realistic about it in that despite all the effort and work that’s gone into trying to simulate what the human brain does, we’re really not even that much closer than we were 10 years ago.

Alexander: This was just a taste, stay tuned as we share the full deep dive interviews we had with each one of our panel of experts and our upcoming episodes focused on specific topics that will transform the way you think about artificial intelligence. All this on UpTech Report’s new series on A.I.

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