Guest editorial
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/DPRG-05-2019-080 |
| Published date | 13 May 2019 |
| Date | 13 May 2019 |
| Pages | 197-207 |
| Author | Jean Paul Simon |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Guest editorial
Jean Paul Simon
Winters and summers: the continuing story of artificial intelligence
There is a consensus that computers have not yet passed a valid Turing Test but there is
growing controversy at this point. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Introduction
Over the past few years, the issue of artificial intelligence (AI) has come to the fore among
technological trends. Someyears ago, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) were among
the leading technological trends as regularly analysed by specialist consultancies. A
December 2017 IDATE survey of experts’ opinions ranked AI first as the key technology for
the 2025 horizon, ahead of IoT [Big data was ranked fifth (Seval), 2018]. A February 2018
GSMA report states: “Manyregard 2017 as the year AI sprang out of fiction and fully entered
the mainstreamconsciousness for the first time” (GSMA, 2018a,p.4).
AI is now expectedto be one of the most pervasive disruptive technologies.AI was one of the
big attractions at the2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2018[1]), supposedly“rocking”
the CES floors according to the trade press. Magazines have been covering the topic quite
extensively. A recent United Nations report stresses that AI has the “ability to transform vast
amounts of complex, ambiguous information into real insights [and] has the potentialto help
solve some of the world’s most enduring problems and to undertake tasks with greater
efficiency and scale than a human could” (Project Breakthrough [UN], 2017a). However,
what AI is supposed to disturb and how is not very clear. As noted by Atkinson (2018) the
techno-utopians, as he calls them, base their predictions on over-optimistic assumptions.
Indeed, Bringsjord and Govindarajulu(2018) stress that, at the 1956 kick-off conference,the
famous DARPA-sponsored summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, “Herb
Simon predicted that thinking machinesable to match the human mind were ‘just around the
corner’”. However, as Aggarwal (2018) stresses: “The year 2000 had come and gone but
Alan Turing’s prediction of humans creating an AI computer remained unfulfilled” (see
illustration below, Chas Addams’s“Computer Repairman”). Kurtzweil even noted that Simon
and Newell’s over-optimistic 1958 paper became “an embarrassment and making
researcherscareful to circulate their prognostication” (Kurttzweil,2000, p. 69).
Jordan (2018) notes that “AI gives rise to levelsof over-exuberance and media attention that
is not present in other areasof engineering”. Obviously, this is reminiscent of the kind of hype
that big data was triggering a fewyears ago (De Prato, Simon, 2015). Typically, big data was
hailed as the “new oil” of this century, now AI is praised asthe “new electricity”[2]: “AI is the
new electricity, and is transforming multipleindustries” (Ng[3] Coursera, Stanford) (Artificial
Intelligence Index, 2017) or as the glue of the next industrial revolution. The 2018 EC
communication on AI notes as well “Like the steam engine or electricity in the past, AI is
transforming our world, our society and our industry”. A softer way to describe the potential
changes and disruptions is to predict a change similar to that caused by the introduction of
the personal computer in the 1980s. One can remain sceptical or critical of what Filloux
(2017) qualifies as “the upcoming miracles of A.I., all promoted by great silicon snake oil
storytellers”.For the internet guru J. Lanier “AI is just a propagandistmetaphor”[4] (quoted by
Rendelues, 2018). They are indeed some good reasons to be cautious, as noted by Ezratty
Jean Paul Simon is based
at JpsMultiMedia, Seville,
Spain.
DOI 10.1108/DPRG-05-2019-080 VOL. 21 NO. 3 2019, pp. 197-207, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2398-5038 jDIGITAL POLICY, REGULATION AND GOVERNANCE jPAGE 197
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