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Editor’s note: This is the latest OpTech Report in a series of video interviews with complete transcripts about the ongoing evolution of Artificial Intelligence. UpTech is a partnership between YourLocalStudio.com and WRAL TechWire.
Welcome to UpTech Report series on AI. I’m Alexander Ferguson. This video [and transcript] is part of our deep dive interview series where we share the wealth of knowledge given by one of our panel of experts in the field of artificial intelligence.
This is the third part of my conversation with Rett Crocker, CEO and CTO of UDU in Raleigh, NC. Rett has designed and developed over 100 games for mobile devices, personal computers, and video game consoles. He’s also invented multiple programming languages, game engines, and multiuser content, and he’s created innovative software technologies in fields ranging from speech synthesis to advergaming to collaborative education.
In this video, I talk to Rett about AI augmentation, whether AI will replace people and what to expect in the future of artificial intelligence.
The interview:
- I start with asking Rett, how can AI help employees?
There are multiple companies that are doing AI-type stuff with customer support people where they’re effectively augmenting what those people do. So they are sitting there on the other end of a chat session and a person says, oh, I’ve got a problem with my cable modem or something, my Internet’s gone out, or I don’t know what it is, something’s wrong with my x.
And the system sort of reads that text in and tries to guess, oh, it’s probably one, two, or three is their problem, and so the customer support person doesn’t actually have to say, debug the full thing.
They just have to say click, click, click, and eventually they’ll get involved right, ’cause it’ll get 80% of the way there, probably.
- Will AI replace people?
So there’s the gentle version of that, which is that most people aren’t going to be replaced.
I often say the goal with UDU certainly, and certainly with other AIs, but I know it’s our goal definitely is augmentation, not intelligence. So we are trying to make humans smarter, because let’s face it, in this world that we live in, there’s a lot of instances where humans are doing grunt work, stuff that is so dead simple that anybody could do it and it’s amazing to me that we’re allowing human intelligence to do something like, I gotta look on LinkedIn and find this person’s job title.
That’s dumb. Why are we doing that?
But it’s sometimes that’s what you have to do. To be fair, there’s also things that humans are good at and machines are not and vice versa, and really, I think the right future for us, I don’t know if we’ll end up there, but the right future for us is one where the AIs of the world are basically aiding us and allowing us to do, not have to do that grunt work, and instead, we’re doing all the stuff that really requires a big brain.
The reality through, so that’s the nice version, the reality though is that yeah, people are gonna lose their jobs. No question about it.
So, that’s a net loss to humanity in terms of jobs, but I would argue that it’s a net gain in terms of, it’s a net gain to humanity in terms of quality of life, and so those folks will hopefully find jobs where they don’t have to sit in a cube farm every day and click click click.
- How can employees prepare for and adapt to the emergence of artificial intelligence?
If you’re sort of planning to be in the business world 10 years from now, then you better be familiar and comfortable with this technology, although to be fair, one of the things that good software does is it has affordances for its users.
Rett Crocker, CEO and CTO of udu
So the best examples of that in my opinion are with folks that have disabilities of some type. That’s a pretty dramatic affordance to account for, and the best software does that. In many ways, AI needs to do the same thing, because we humans, even though we’ve got like really interesting ways of thinking, we’re slow and dumb in some ways compared to AI verticals anyway, at that particular task, and so having, if the AI makers of the future and today are any good, they’re gonna build software that actually works well with the human component.
I’m a big believer in what’s called human-in-the-loop technology, which is basically having AI, again, it’s sort of augmentation. It’s like AI where there’s a human component there and that human is there to both check the AI’s work and sort of help grade it, validate it, what have you, but also to help that human, effectively it becomes a symbiotic relationship, right, where the human and the AI sort of work together to solve a particular problem.
- Lastly, I asked Rett, what is the future of AI?
The future of AI is, I think it’s many different things. I think it’s much more likely that we’re gonna end up with a lot of sort of vertical AI systems that can do a thing very well than one general-purpose that can do a lot of things. We’re not gonna end up with HAL. We’re gonna end up with, Google Assistant is really quite good at figuring out, well, not Google Assistant, really, it’s maps and things like that. They’re quite good at giving me information about locations.
So having a bunch of verticals and then having a way to tie them all together is what I think actually eventually gets us something that’s more like a general-purpose AI, but I don’t think it’ll be general-purpose. I mean, that eventually will happen. I am pretty confident of that fact. The things you see with Google’s translation engines, inventing their own languages and all that stuff really sort of illustrates that we’re sort of both further along and way behind where we thought we’d be.
If I had to truly predict and say, okay, five years from now, what does AI look like, I would say that I think self-driving cars are either a couple years away or 20 years away. I’m not really sure which. So five years, I’d place that bet.
I don’t think it’d be 100% general-purpose, like you’re gonna let it go anywhere, it’d be like most places. I think the thing to really think about from an AI standpoint is what we truly want it to do. I think of it in the context of business quite often, because that’s what we do.
There are a lot of very difficult questions that business owners and business people generally have that could be answered with good data, and, so as long as you can get good data, then you can get pretty good predictions. And so I think that is where things get interesting.
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 Reports’ new series on AI.
