AI – The good, the bad and the ugly
This blog post concerns AI also known as Artificial Intelligence. I will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly about it. Yesterday, I had a moving crew helping moving. One was a student in college who was given a topic on AI say it is good. He had to write an essay in his English class on this subject. I showed him my books by Jay Forrester. Jay was a professor at MIT. He developed system dynamics and wrote several books and developed modeling programs using his system. Guess what these were AI systems! His book “World Dynamics” models were just reviewed and appear to be accurate predictions of out future from the 1970’s. This computer modeling work was done back in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 1978, a book was published called “Robots on your Doorsteps“. Again this book outlined an AI concept of machine learning in 1978!
I told the student AI was nothing new. The good is it can predict or model any processes. This ranges from industrial processes to farming to many art forms. The bad was most people business managers in particular are clueless about understanding many knowledge based processes. These managers types often go with fads, like Stephen R. Covey books, good to display behind your desk to show you know the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. All show and no go! Right now AI is a fad. A friend just got let go from his job due to a silly manager’s believe that AI can do his job. This is the ugly! People using AI can be and will be the ugly.
So how did I learn about Jay?
Well I talked with a man named Glenn Duncan, while in school getting my first masters degree. He told me about Jay’s books. I purchased Jay’s paper back text book on “Industrial Dynamics”. Years later, I found a book Glenn had owned in a used book store in Atlanta. You can say Glenn was one of my mentors. He was a bit crazy and hung up on the JFK assassination. Now you can get these on Amazon. They are reasonably priced. However, the “World Dynamics” book is a first edition and rare. It also had Glenn’s Fortran programs in it as a bonus. I used Forrester’s methods to write many of my simulation programs as a programmer/designer from the 1970’s on. They worked. His concepts use calculus. I have not met any MBA managers who are calculus math stars. In 50+ years in the corporate world, I met no managers who really knew calculus. As for me, I had 4 courses in calculus, Matrix algebra, a minor in physics, and 14 statistical courses many at a graduate level.
Later on AI developments
In 1991, I got a book the 5th generation. I used the concepts in the book to write a computer program(s) to help me write programs using the methods I developed using top down programing methods and IO structures from a previous computer company I worked at. I then generated a 13,000+ line COBOL program and tested it in two weeks. After we did the walk thru. No one talked with me in that group again. The manager also gave me a poor review (Peer fear and management fear – more of the ugly!) Of note I used these programs at several job sites in the future. At one job site I need to convert IBM comp-3 numbers to characters to load into a PeopleSoft Oracle database. These program scared my project manager (a nutter) and the workers at the company because the were not well educated computer nerds like me.
While Jay wrote his programs in Fortran, many of mine I wrote mine in COBOL in the business world. COBOL is great at text processing. Fortran not so much.
Now the student’s question to me
The student asked me what I feared now. Well I stated, “authoritarian leaders“. They are much more dangerous than AI will ever be. The reason I am concerned about them is they have bad psychology traits, like the Dark Triad. The reason is that now incompetent mid level manager’s now have what we call in psychology “permission given” by these bad leaders. This mean they saw a strongman in leadership person model these bad behaviors. Guess who that maybe? They then use these bad behaviors on others! I saw this during my years working in the computer world. I see it now at every business I go to!
AI Timelines
Per my timeline blog post, AI has been with us since the 1960’s. We now have wide spread AI use because out computers are much more powerful than the computers back in the era of the 1960’s to early 2000’s. We now have faster processors, graphic card processors (GPU’s) now and tons of fast searchable data storage, and better database technologies. Thus the programs can search and make decisions based on game theory, decision tree logic, and even photo generation.
In summary
The AI development time line goes from the late 1960’s to now. That is 50+ years of development in computer technology. In this post, I discussed the good, the bad and the ugly of AI. What makes AI good is the information it can give. What makes it bad and ugly are how people will use it. Predicting the future at best, is difficult and psychics earn a lot of money attempting to do this. AI maybe better than psychics. Humans without skills and knowledge are the difficulty.