The 30% reduction in graduate recruitment this year has been attributed to the substitution of artificial intelligence (AI) in those roles that graduates might otherwise have filled.
I’m not entirely convinced. Recruitment is sharply down across the board and may well be a measure of the impact of the steep increase in employment costs brought about by the Chancellor’s budget, and its impact on overall business confidence.
I was told by one large recruiter that, having previously given over to AI the entire process of sifting the curriculum vitae of all its applicants, it was now having to hand it back a human process because the AI employed by graduates, when crafting their applications, had proved more than a match for the AI system that was designed to score them.
The key thing to keep in mind about AI, is that the intelligence is artificial. Its strength is that it can handle huge amounts of information, vastly more that our brains can. But it still has to be told exactly what to do with all that information by algorithms designed by human minds. Accordingly, it can be trained to detect patterns across enormous data sets at lightning speeds. These were once functions that we struggled to do ourselves, taking much longer and with a greater propensity to make mistakes.
AI can work very hard for us when we are clever enough to harness its possibilities, but it cannot think. Which is what only we can do.
Elon Musk believes that AI is ‘summoning the demon’ and in 2015 he signed an open letter together with Stephen Hawking and others warning of the pitfalls of AI development.
I’m reminded of Hal 9000, the name of the computer in the 1969 film A space Odyssey, which decides to end the mission by blowing up the spaceship and its crew.
The danger is not that AI can be intrinsically good or evil, only that its applications can be developed by stupid, negligent, thoughtless, even evil but nevertheless, very clever people.
The two great dystopian English novels of the last century are Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The late Neil Postman, a trenchant critic of digital technology, pointed out that In the former, the regime deprives us of our liberty by harnessing technology to deceive us, withhold information from us and monitor our every movement and conversation.
But by contrast, Huxley paints a picture where truth is drowned in a sea of trivia and irrelevance, where we have so much information we are reduced to passivity.
“Orwell feared those that would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one”.
I wonder which of these dreadful visions AI better lends itself to.
Perhaps it is a danger of the worst of both. Certainly, the mass surveillance society developing in China, assisted by AI, is the most obvious oppression. But then the development of social media and online retailing, which influences what we do, buy, and desire, is an equally frightful prospect.
In what remains of the summer my suggestion is to turn off our screens, read books, and think for ourselves.