Nilay Patel on Software Brain

Every now and then someone crystalizes a lot of the thoughts that spin around discussions, debates, and dialogues about a topic. When those topics are of great import, when the crystallization shows up, it is not only wise, but essential to pay attention. Call it a benchmark. Call it a new starting point for the conversation going forward. Nilay Patel has delivered just a benchmark to pay attention to with his monologue of sorts on his Decoder podcast. If you’re not up for a listen, you can give it a read on The Verge.

For the clear thinking presented there is a confusing array of headlines to choose from depending where you look, Including The People Do Not Yearn For Automation, and Why People Hate AI, but the one I think should stick shows up in my browser tab: Beware Software Brain.

Patel takes a well considered tour through the arguments and discussion that are scattered about and pulls them together nicely. If you ask for a core theme, I’d say that he argues that there are two schools of thought. One rushing to turn AI into what controls our lives. The other isn’t buying the sales pitch.

To me it’s always been a tough sell to foist this innovation on people if one of your selling points is that it will make their jobs unnecessary, let alone create environmentally hazardous data centers to run the machines that are going to eventually unemploy them. I know a few folks who, after training themselves up on AI to do what they do, only to be dismissed in favor of the AI once that training is complete. I  don’t think it’s going to be much longer before that predicament touches someone everyone knows.

Getting inside what makes the folks pushing AI’s thinking, Patel defines “Software Brain” as follows:

So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

He later goes on:

Anyone who’s actually ever run a database knows this. At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around.

You need to read or listen to the whole piece.

While I think “Software Brain” well defines the mindset of those celebrating and working towards an AI future. The crux of the matter for me, on perhaps a larger scale, is that for some reason, as ambiguous and arbitrary as we humans can be, we seem to shy away from our own ambiguity in favor of looking for a binary solution. On or off. Right or wrong. Correct or incorrect. We get angry with the shades and shadows of grey that muddy our yearning for black and white.

Perhaps a binary approach to everything seems like it would make life easier. It certainly helps avoid the danger zones of responsibility.

These are certainly early days of whatever Artificial Intelligence may or may not become. Even so, it appears to me it’s just going to be yet another way humans develop, market, and use to avoid facing the tough choices life tosses at us, or we toss at each other. I’m glad to see there is increasing skepticism.

I don’t build or code things with AI, so I can’t speak to that degree of what seems so exciting to so many. That said, the one thing I keep coming back to in my own, very rudimentary experiments with AI is this. At the moment it’s as error prone, and often as ambiguous and obsequious as any human in correcting itself. It seems to be a very human response etched into the code by its creators, knowing things don’t add up. Much like apparently, our DNA. The machines and the math behind them just don’t care.

I don’t think the humans running this race do either.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.