Friday 2 October 2015

Keeping it real about AI

So much focus in the news on artificial intelligence is far from droning on, believes Will Mooney, Carter Jonas partner and head of commercial in the eastern region

It is incumbent upon any professional adviser to have an understanding of their clients’ business. Those with clients in the technology sector, acknowledge that the speed of change means they are always going to be learning something new. 

The latest technology to intrigue me is Artificial Intelligence (AI).Like many, I do get the basic concept but what’s more tricky is understanding its wordly application and how, in the not too distant future, this might affect my working, domestic and social world.

I could say that understanding AI is above my pay grade, so to speak, but perhaps, one day, an AI-primed robot my be on my pay grade instead of me. Time will tell. But surely all of us with enquiring minds, operating on any pay grade, must be wondering about the the impact that AI is having -  and will have -  on the working world within our life times.

Like most technological developments, AI and its attendent world of robotics once sat in a comfortable package with drone technology in having their roots in governments’ defence spending before coming in to civil use.  As did the first usable prototype of the Internet and look how far down business civvy street that had travelled from the mid-1960s by the mid-1990s.

With drone-eye views of large properties, sites and country estates fast becoming the ‘must-have’ tool in the property agents’ marketing armoury, I can’t help but wonder what mundane but essential jobs in my industry could be happily handed over to an office robot.

It’s been suggested that in the legal world, robots could take on the job of legal executives in checking all is in order on page after page or screen after screen of contracts and agreements.  Whither the legal exec then?

The consensus appears to be that it is jobs in the creative industries which are at least threat from being undermined by AI technology. However, do bear in mind that the people relaying this message are in the media – one of those creative industries.

Far from being a threat to jobs, there are those involved in the world of AI who see their work as freeing up people to do what humans really are good at: being creative and, well, being human. Taking this line, it’s easy to follow the argument that industrialisation has shackled us humans and made machines and drones of us. We do more than be.

In a delicious and ironic twist, perhaps the robots we make and the intelligence we equip them with will free us up to re-discover what the essence of being human is?  This latter point was made with alacrity in a recent interview by Eric Horvitz who is the Director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond laboratory in Seattle.  

The more cynical members of the human race than this esteemed scientist and scholar can’t help but wonder if discovering the essence of our species isn’t a more threatening thought than that of having our jobs done by robots...

It may be that, one day, my job can and will be done by a robot.  But no matter how advanced its intelligence develops to replicate or exceed my own, I do wonder if it will ever share a gut instinct about a deal or the visceral delight and sense of achievement when the deal is sealed.  There’s definitely nothing artificial about those feelings.


Will Mooney MRICS
Partner

Commercial, Cambridge

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