AI is a Misnomer

Have you heard of a ‘super recogniser’? No nor me, until I met one such super recogniser this morning and discovered they are the people who rectify mistakes made by so-called AI. And sorry if everyone else knew this, but I realised there and then that AI is a misnomer and AI is not Artificial Intelligence, just more complicated computer technology. It’s a point that bears repeating before anyone gets carried away and thinks that AI will be the silver bullet to get the NHS working again, the police to solve crime or the traffic industry to stop jams.

So sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but let me explain the connection between super recognisers and the flaw in our leaders banking on AI to revive our ailing economies. Here goes:

My new super recogniser acquaintance discovered her talent while watching This Morning years ago. “There was some professor on from The University of Greenwich talking about the ability to recognise people’s faces. I assumed that everyone can do this, but apparently they can’t. They were after people to research so I signed up.” (Lord Frost need not apply.)

It turns out my new chum is in the top 1% of super recognisers in that she can see someone’s face once and remember the face from all sorts of different angles and locations. She’s great with all races, which apparently not all super recognisers are. After being trained up she now works in the evenings, looking at images of faces captured by private security firms and matching them up to the faces suggested by facial recognition technology taken from various databases of suspects (I didn’t get round to asking where that came from). Now here’s the disappointing bit: according to my chum, the matches she is presented with by the facial recognition software are only accurate 75% percent of the time. (Big Brother Watch thinks the matches of live facial recognition technology have an even lower hit rate.)“Quite often the matches are laughable,” she explains. If arrests are to be made, facial technology must also be overseen by a human operative, hence the use of super recognisers – because the so-called AI is less top set, more SEN.

This disappointing situation can be applied to all sorts of other so called AI solutions: reading MRI scans, X-rays, understanding blood test results; all of the AI suggestions will need to be verified by humans – for at least the first few years until it gets better. And why is this? Because AI is not Artificial Intelligence, it’s just technology. Hopefully impressive technology, but it is not and nor will it ever be intelligent.

Defined by Dr. Johnson as “spirit, unembodied mind”, intelligence will always and forever elude these machines and software that are currently misnamed AI. Sure, these AI might be able to solve problems and learn from data but they will never be intelligent. School mums will always be there in the background, working part-time making sure they’ve read the X-ray properly.

We are not the first generation to naïvely bequeath non-existent intelligence to machines. There is the famous incidence in 1601 when Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary presented a mechanical clock to the Emperor of China who thought this clever automata was a living creature. We who pin our hopes on AI are as green as that Emperor; it’s just tech, and should therefore be called AT – Advanced Technology – rather than AI.

It’s all Descartes’s fault for positing the mind-body duality which allows us to imagine that if there is a body, there may well follow a mind. The 18th century saw great discussion and interest in the potentiality of automata – all the fancy fountains, clocks and clever self-running toys that were made – to develop souls. The roots for this go way back into folklore when it was believed that animal or ancestral spirits would inhabit puppets. Alas they don’t; in the same way that life does not inhabit a machine and intelligence not exist within a computer. Pinocchio will never become a real boy.

Then as now, we just got carried away with the novelty of new invention. The only known higher intelligence in the universe is human. And that fact is perhaps more terrifying than the prospect of non-intelligent AI.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.