Not not going to happen

There’s plenty of debate over whether AI is real. Part of that is on us: If you were to show a computer scientist from 50 years ago a modern algorithm’s ability to drive a car, identify images, compose text, or diagnose diseases, they’d immediately conclude that AI was here. We do incredible things, unthinkable things, things at scale that simply weren’t conceivable in the mainframe era.

But AI is brittle. It makes mistakes. At best, it complements human intelligence. Here’s an example from theinimitable Janelle Shaneof what happens when you train an AI on recipe titles, and ask it to make up some of its own:

I don’t know about you, but when an algorithm tries to sell me whole chicken cookies topped with Beasy Mist, I’m not too worried about my job. Ultimately, AI isn’tartificialintelligence, it’sdifferentintelligence. So do we need to act—or is AI little more than cognitive augmentation?

I think there are two reasons to act, both now and strongly, to make sure machine learning is deployed wisely and tackles the right problems.

AI is the next step up the stack

The first is that AI is a logical progression of computer trends that have been happening for decades:

• The rise of the modern, RAID-like data center (with cross-connects and redundancy, distributed across several physical locations) gave us significant, centralized computing and storage power.

• Cloud computing made these data centers elastic, so you didn’t have to buy what you didn’t need. You could “own the base and rent the spike,” which made new, experimental computing workloads economically appealing.

• This, in turn, meant sharing infrastructure, and led to “bursty” workloads. With this model, anyone could analyze vast reams of information quickly. And of course, the modern, connected, mobile Internet was only too happy to provide that torrent of data for analysis.

• Once organizations had that much data stored in data lakes and object stores, they needed algorithms to crunch through it. Initially that might have been statistics, but it quickly morphed into smarter code for cleaning, labelling, and finding insights.

• The best of those algorithms create better versions of themselves, which we call Machine Learning.

And that’s the state of modern AI and data science. AI is inevitable because it’s the next step up the stack.

Not not going to happen

The second is what I call the “not not going to happen” argument. I heard a great version of this during a panel I moderated at the 2019 APEX symposium in Ottawa. I asked Deloitte’sShelby Austinwhether she felt organizations needed to act on AI immediately, or whether they could wait. “We don’t knowwhichof the companies deploying AI today will win,” she replied, “but we know the winnerwilluse AI.” (I’m paraphrasing a bit here.)

This is a good Occam’s Razor for AI adoption. We don’t know for sure which AI strategy will win out, or exactly how it will be deployed successfully. But we do know—given AI’s tremendous power to make sense of the torrent of data modern society generates—that AI is notnotgoing to happen.

The automation that machine learning and data science can bring is often a nonpartisan issue—given that it can bring tailored, personalized services to bear, but also can be used to cut costs and run balanced budgets. At the same time, everyone’s concerned about the invasion of privacy that AI might bring (whether that’s analyzing public data to infer private facts; reinforcing prejudices in policing and justice, or myriad other concerns.)

Diving into AI at FWD50

Next week, I’m chairing the third edition of FWD50, which has quickly become a global event on the future of digital government. We’ve welcomed over 30 countries to Ottawa since we launched the conference, and AI has figured prominently in the lineup since that first year. I’ve written up some of the (many)AI-related sessions we’re running in a longer version of this on the conference website.

If you’re interested in how AI and data science change government—and you really, really should be—then FWD50 is the place to be this November. You cangrab a ticket here, and become part of this critical conversation.