Let’s take a few steps back. It is 1990 and a team of medical researchers equipped with a statistician is performing a randomized control study to find out if phenomenon X causes disease Y. They first take the utmost care that the data, I mean the patients, from which they want to derive conclusions, are representative of the population; that the experimental and the control group are properly established; that there are no correlations in the data-set, sorry, cohort, that might contaminate the results of the study; etc, etc… You get the point (I am not a professional statistician, so please ask one for more details). Only after* the experiment is prepared with the utmost rigor, are they allowed to actually make the experiment and apply AI, I mean, statistical methods, to gain predictions. (Did I say predictions? I meant conclusions.)
“We don’t know why, but a state-of-art algorithm told us you can take these”. Photo by Kendal on UnsplashIt is now 2020. Imagine that a team of medical researchers collects a huge amount of profiles of “patients” from a popular social media website, and says “Bingo! We have so much data! Let us apply one of the fancy new statistical, now called AI, methods, and get results without all the effort we used to put into it”. They get the results, make a pill based on them, send it for mass production, the pills start killing instead of curing… It is difficult to imagine, isn’t it? Then why on Earth do we want the prediction methods of the 21st century to be able to turn garbage data into gold? Is it because we gave them such a sophisticated name, Artificial Intelligence, and so we expect them to replace humans altogether?
How about this: instead of saying that AI turns data into prediction, say that it merely consumes the data to be able to perform its daily activities. (So, don’t worry, we are still humanizing AI ’cause it’s so irresistible). So, data is food for AI. When we buy food from the supermarket we know that it has gone through quality control during production to make sure we don’t eat poison. When we pick up spinach from the garden we wash it thoroughly to make sure it is not contaminated with bacteria. Or else we get sick and anything can happen. But from AI we expect it to be almighty and be able to skip all those quality control steps, ’cause AI is, after all, supernatural and such creatures cannot get sick, can they?
So, here is the good news. AI is not going to replace the jobs of radiologists, medical experts, accountants, please finish the list. It is just going to transform the kind of jobs that they are doing and speed up progress. Nobody is going to make AI almighty. Experts will be needed to make sure AI is being fed with the right data. Only *then *will society be able to trust AI. Because it will not be about AI in the end. It will be about the people, again.
Thanks to Patrick Bos, Florian Huber, Carlos Martinez Ortiz, Tom Bakker, and Johan Ridder for the useful remarks.
