It\u2019s always a nice, sunny day when you watch clouds from the above. They have colors shifting between white and grey, with shades of blue coming through, and a red flavor building up as the day comes to a closing. But the sun always shines above the clouds, and the views of those soft lands extending till the horizon look like no other place. The shape of clouds are known, also games of light on the running sky are, but the flying perspective adds many layers to the viewer, that could have been hardly imaginable. The extent, till the horizon, stretch to an unmeasurable length, but maybe the difficulty of reading distances, maybe the fact that something like this you have already seen, lying on the grass, maybe that flying is simply not so new nowadays, in any case not even children today shout for the marvel, and most in fact find it more desirable to nap, or watch a movie instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Me I\u2019m typing, during this flight, and it\u2019s a Sunday, and I hate travelling on Sundays. But this time is a bit different, and this typing, that usually is a personal stretch of my consciousness into the lands of unconscious intuitions, aims to reach out to readers. I am flying to Oslo for an AI conference, the strange and awkward tool that builds on millions of terabytes of digitalized knowledge, conversations, images, will be discussed at the heart of a multinational, multi-billion Euro company delivering intellectual services in industrial domains. The domain expertise we can command within the organization stretches like clouds covering a great land of knowledge, but it\u2019s the thousands of people that, like a cloudy sky, deliver and look like a known, friendly landscape, solid ground below and rain building above your head, windy fresh air as a premonition of the evening rain. The new AI models come acting into the same domain, but watching them resembles the sky from above \u2013 looks familiar but somehow is wrong, it shades a somewhat unnatural lighting (can it really be sunshine every day, the whole day?), even if no visible element seems truly new, and the unnatural never takes a distinct scary face. From interest to boring to doing something else is a 2 minutes stretch for the viewer. But looking the clouds from above allows for no fresh air giving you clues about the future, you can only feel the airconditioned air of the airplane steadily flowing on you, and you won\u2019t be able to follow on with your life in this \u201cland of the above\u201d, as it\u2019s not a land, it does not exist in any dimension we know, some have parachuted themselves alive down from here, but it\u2019s freezing cold so high, and the few minutes that would take you to come back down to the ground where we were grown would just allow in the best case to come through it, but not really to inhabit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We people require a dimension to exist that is complex and mostly physical, and when facing the friendly scripts from our AI gently pouring unforeseen knowledge on us with perfect semantics it feels familiar in some way, but it misses all clues that could normally help us navigate a conversation. And the side of the clouds that we never see, if not in brief moments we watch from an airplane window, are as much alien to our existence as the surface of Mars or a nuclear reaction. Imaginable, manageable maybe, usable, but surely not human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Allow me to be explicit, nuclear reactions on the sun allow life on our planet, and clouds have been poetry for all children, Mars made the scene for some great books, none of this is bad, but the \u201cimagination\u201d of those things is human. AI is not human, human is only the perception of AI, AI communicates through languages that are familiar to us but the protocol that calculating each word or pixel follows is not human, even if grown on mostly human-made information. And in the specialty of cognitive performance it has unprecedented power, a bit like Schwarzenegger at his best trying to beat a crane in powerlifting, or a 100 meters gold medalist competing in speed against a motorcycle, an F1 car, a jet. It also potentially forgets nothing that it has stored \u2013 would you prefer to have a new doctor assessing your headache, or a computer trained on all medical knowledge, updated with all your medical checks and information till you were born?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Would you still prefer the machine if the doctor was a person you trust and who knows you for long time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is roughly the question I am travelling to explore in Oslo tomorrow, a question about trust, reliability, and opportunity. It\u2019s a technical question, it\u2019s a business question, it\u2019s a question that requires as much knowledge about the machine, as is required about the human nature of our proceeding. The plane is beginning to land, I am requested to stop typing on the machine. The clouds are again at their place, above my head, and I\u2019ll be folding my screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n