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ISBN-13: 978-1-9993253-1-2
ISBN-10: 1-9993253-1-1
iii
Contents
Acknowledgements v
Foreword vi
1 Setting the Scene 1
2. What is Artificial Intelligence? 9
3. Algorithms, Models and more Algorithms 32
4. The AI Explosion. Neural Networks and Deep Learning 56
5. A Bit Further down the Rabbit Hole… 80
6. AI at Work 93
7. AI in Society 115
8. Ethics and the Law 130
9. What Does the Future Hold? 156
Appendix A. Further Reading 165
Appendix B. Glossary of Artificial Intelligence Terminology 168
About the Author 187
Notes 189
iv
Acknowledgements
v
Foreword
vi
1. Setting the Scene
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Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
2
Setting the Scene
3
Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
4
Setting the Scene
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Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
they can tell all their friends and neighbors about it. It’s a status
symbol rather than something that’s practically useful. Goodness
knows the number of drivers I’ve met who bought cars with self-
park features who, after showing them off once, never used them
again, or the mountains of virtual reality headsets that now lie idle.
As you can probably gather, my view is that the technology side
of things is often the easy part. People and society are far more
complex and difficult to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not
saying artificial intelligence tech isn’t enormously complex, and it
only exists because of some very clever people, but the fundamental
elements of artificial intelligence systems are a lot easier to get to
grips with than the nuances of the human condition.
With that in mind, the goal of this book is not to preach about
AI and all the wonderful things that it might lead to. Nor is it my view
as to what will happen in the future. Instead, the aim is to act as a
guide to explain artificial intelligence and to put forward some of the
arguments about its use and misuse. By understanding what AI is
and how it works, this will help you form your own opinions as to
how to approach artificial intelligence-based technologies. It’s then
up to you to decide what the pros and cons are and what, if anything,
we should do about it.
With that in mind, the key things we are going to cover in the
chapters that follow are:
• Describe the risks and dangers, legal and ethical issues around
the use and misuse of artificial intelligence.
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Setting the Scene
• Mull over some of the things that may (or may not) be on the
horizon in the next few years.
• It’s not an anti-AI piece either. I’ve seen what the stone age
was like and I don’t want to go there. I want to move forward
not backwards. Something doesn’t have to be perfect to be of
benefit, it just needs to be better than what came before.
Where, on balance, AI can make life better, let’s get on with
it.
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Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
8
2. What is Artificial Intelligence?
“Any artificial intelligence smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know
to fail it”7
OK. So, I hear this term “Artificial Intelligence” being talked about
all the time, but what is it? It’s supposed to be everywhere but I
haven’t yet met an android that I can have a meaningful
conversation with. I keep hoping to meet one in a bar or at my next
book club meeting, but no luck yet.
There are loads of different and varied explanations as to what
artificial intelligence is but, I’m afraid to say, there isn’t one universal
definition that everyone agrees with. Not to worry. Let’s have a bit
of a poke around and see what we can come up with.
A simple and very practical explanation is that something
human-made, a machine, that can act and reason just like a person
embodies all that it means to be artificially intelligent. This isn’t an
unreasonable place to start and leads one to envisage a world filled
with human-like robots doing human-like things. Possibly our
servants, conceivably our masters, maybe our friends. But what
about dogs and dolphins? Don’t they display a degree of intelligence
also? Mmm. Let’s leave animal intelligence out of the debate for
now.
If we were to go back in time a few years, then this description
of human-like entities behaving in a similar way to ourselves is one
that many people would have readily agreed with without much
further thought. In fact, the ability to replicate human behaviour is a
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Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
key feature of the famous “Turing test.” This was devised by the
mathematician Alan Turing,8 back in the mid-20th century, to
determine if a computer can be considered intelligent.
In the test, Turing envisaged a human in one room and a
machine in another. A human judge then converses with the human
and the machine remotely, without knowing which is which. The
judge may engage them in conversations about the weather, politics,
the latest clip they’d seen on YouTube or anything else they liked.
The machine is deemed to be intelligent if, after a period of time
spent in conversation, the Judge is unable to distinguish between the
human and the machine.
At the time of writing, no machine has passed the Turing test,
although there have been some very good efforts, and it will
probably be many years before a computer is able to do so
convincingly and repeatedly9.
The Turing test is pretty cool, but it’s not without its problems.
Lots of people have tried to write computer programs that mimic
human responses in an attempt to fool the judge and pass the test,
and when the test is finally passed, this is probably the route that will
be taken. The focus has been on passing the test, rather than creating
something that is actually intelligent; i.e. clever programming tricks
designed to deceive are not in the spirit in which the test was
originally conceived. To put it another way, these people who are
trying to pass the test haven’t built a really kick-ass robot, and then
said: “Oh, by-the-way, I wonder if it would be any good at the Turing
test? What do you think Robot, do you want to give it a go?” Rather,
they’ve said “Mmm, let’s see, what do we need to do to pass the
Turing test? and let’s try and build something that does that.”
Another argument against using the Turing test to assess
intelligence is that a machine doesn’t need to be conscious in the way
people are to pass the test. It doesn’t need to be self-aware of its
actions or have any understanding of the responses it makes. It can
pass by just blindly following some (very complex) computer code.
If we stick to the concept of a fully conscious self-aware
thinking machine, with all the different mental capabilities that we
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Glossary of Artificial Intelligence Terminology
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Artificial Intelligence for Everyone
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Glossary of Artificial Intelligence Terminology
all of the tools, apps and gadgets in the world today that the tech
companies describe as incorporating artificial intelligence.
13
Notes
1 Max Brooks. (2006). World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
Crown.
2 This is a version of Amara's Law, formulated by the American futurologist
Roy Charles Amara (1925 – 2007). This stated that: “We tend to
overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate
the effect in the long run.”
3 For example, Elon Musk was reported to have been talking about
fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving
fast enough.”
5 Yves Mersch. (2019). “Money and private currencies - reflections on
but there is a body of opinion that they are actually very different. I really
like the explanation by Laurie Vazquez on the Big Think website, which
goes like this: “A Geek is an enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks
are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their
subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest
things that their subject has to offer. A Nerd is a studious intellectual,
although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement”
oriented, and focus their efforts on acquiring knowledge and skill over trivia
14
Notes
49, p. 433-460.
9 There is some debate as to what constitutes a pass and under what
conditions. For example, how the judge is selected, and how many and what
type of questions they can ask. In my view, the machine would need to be
able to pass the majority of the time, when questioned at length about a
wide range of topics by a person of at least average intelligence. A one-off
fluke win would not count in my book.
10 John R. Searle. (1980). “Minds, brains, and programs.” Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3 (3), p. 417-457. Also see the arguments in the 2019 book
by Christof Koch: “The Feeling of Life Itself: Why consciousness is
widespread but can’t be computed.” And those by Roger Penrose in his
books: “The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and
the Laws of Physics” and “Shadows of The Mind: A Search for the Missing
Science of Consciousness.”
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