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.
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I don’t go to the gulag pubs where you have recite your ID number before you can get a drink
We have our own freedom pub
Sadly not found such a pub yet where I live so they are all closed to me
I haven’t come a pub yet that is serious about the QR code stuff. Most are just going through the motions and are not strict about it. People either pretend to use it or just don’t bother.
My favourite pub is open but it has a flat, sterile atmosphere as if drinking in a shop storeroom. Mask wearing is depressingly ahered to by the regulars (not me) even if taking just three steps to and from the main door. That the landlady goes about without a mask herself does not seem register with my fellow drinkers. I find it perplexing.
Why do we continually refer to ‘as a result of the pandemic’ when it is a result of government policy – plain and simple – right?
Totally agree. I am forever correcting people on that one.
Yes. Entirely correct. The pandemic itself has caused few problems in the greater scheme of things. The hysterical overreaction, both by government and a pliant public, has caused the damage.
The government wants to engineer a situation where vaccinated people can mix as they please and therefore any difficulties economically can be blamed on those who won’t submit.
We were in LONDON for the anti Lockdown demo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday 10am meet fellow lockdown sceptics
Join our Telegram Group: t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
To be honest I don’t have that much sympathy. A lot of them have happily gone along with these absurd measures – what do they expect.
Part of the grand plan to crush the spirit of Brits by destroying whee we meet, where we worship, families, relationships, small businesses.
Hancocks has gone. Johnson and Gove next.
Enough is enough.
I will never comfortable in a pub – not until I can simply walk in, go to the bar, and get myself a drink. (And I promise not, unlike the Health Secretary, to get caught having a emotional rendezvous with a member of the bar staff in the cellar.)
I will never [feel] comfortable in a pub…
The working class must be crushed by the WOKEing class
It’s like watching Whales trapped on a sand bar, refusing to help themselves and go back into the sea! I just don’t care about these businesses any more, they have had fifteen months to register all the facts, if they can’t help themselves so be it. I only go to pubs where I can sit in an outside space, be served, end of. I don’t go anywhere where masks are put on for standing up etc…totally demented. Just frickin open, take the chance, advertise, block the courts up, be dammed if you lose your licence, get together and protest, just DO something!