The Hype & Hope of Artificial Intelligence

Much like “the cloud,” “big data,” and “machine learning” before it, the term “artificial intelligence” has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters. What AI means, why we need it and where we are going with it — my arguments. This was a column originally published in The New Yorker in 2016.

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Earlier this month, on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver skewered media companies’ desperate search for clicks. Like many of his bits, it became a viral phenomenon, clocking in at nearly six million views on YouTube. At around the ten-minute mark, Oliver took his verbal bat to the knees of Tronc, the new name for Tribune Publishing Company, and its parody-worthy promotional video, in which a robotic spokeswoman describes the journalistic benefits of artificial intelligence, as a string section swells underneath.

Tronc is not the only company to enthusiastically embrace the term “artificial intelligence.” A.I. is hot, and every company worth its stock price is talking about how this magical potion will change everything. Even Macy’s recently announced that it was testing an I.B.M. artificial-intelligence tool in ten of its department stores, in order to bring back customers who are abandoning traditional retail in favor of online shopping.

Much like “the cloud,” “big data,” and “machine learning” before it, the term “artificial intelligence” has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters. A lot of what people are calling “artificial intelligence” is really data analytics—in other words, business as usual. If the hype leaves you asking “What is A.I., really?,” don’t worry, you’re not alone.

I asked various experts to define the term and got different answers. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that artificial intelligence is a set of technologies that try to imitate or augment human intelligence. To me, the emphasis is on augmentation, in which intelligent software helps us interact and deal with the increasingly digital world we live in.

Three decades ago, I read newspapers, wrote on an electric typewriter, and watched a handful of television channels. Today, I have streaming video from Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and other places, and I’m sometimes paralyzed by the choices. It is becoming harder for us to stay on top of the onslaught—e-mails, messages, appointments, alerts. Augmented intelligence offers the possibility of winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can’t manage without a helping hand.

Computers in general, and software in particular, are much more difficult than other kinds of technology for most people to grok, and they overwhelm us with a sense of mystery. There was a time when you would record a letter or a document on a dictaphone and someone would transcribe it for you. A human was making the voice-to-text conversion with the help of a machine.

Today, you can speak into your iPhone and it will transcribe your messages itself. If people could have seen our current voice-to-text capabilities fifty years ago, it would have looked as if technology had become sentient. Now it’s just a routine way to augment how we interact with the world. Kevin Kelly, the writer and futurist, whose most recent book is “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future,” said, “What we can do now would be A.I. fifty years ago. What we can do in fifty years will not be called A.I.”