The 0.01% that remains human in the age of AI

One of the major flaws of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is best demonstrated by a joke I read, which is based on the age-old cliché of parents trying to talk their teenage children out of peer pressure. As the joke goes, the answer to the question “if all your friends jumped over the bridge, would you follow them?”, by ML standards, is an absolute “Yes”. This is because ML is based on pattern discovery and to a large extend, favors the majority. Someone explained that the reason we trust computers, and by implication ML, is that they are quite dumb, they have tremendous processing power which helps us human to unravel difficult to see underpinning factors to different phenomena. However, they lack intuition, they lack judgment and bias, which is a double-edged sword in the sense that its both their strongest and weakest points: Its not in the domain of ML for something “to feel right”; if the odds are against it, it remains so.

So that brings us to the moral question of when should we go with our intuition as humans? Where should we draw the line of what we can allow ML to tell us? Well, I suppose that is hard to tell. But personally, I am yet to encounter a machine learning model that tells me that the probability of something is 100%. So its upto humans to fill up the 0.01% that somewhat refuses to fill up with whatever they can. In my opinion, we can only fill up this room with hope and human intuition. Of course, not the best approach, as someone said, “hope is not a strategy”. But that said, I would quip back that after all is said and done what remains is hope.

For instance, let’s take a case of the rocket scientists at NASA, I presume they are some of the most thorough planners we have on earth; I have been monitoring the journey of the two space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in awe of the great minds that came up with such and planned their trajectories almost half a century ago. I can only imagine how in their planning; NASA never leave anything to chance.

In spite of such thorough planning, we also know of some failed and sometimes catastrophic missions. We can recall space shuttle Columbia’s disaster and the Hubble’s mirror flaw, for example. Because of such I know what the 0.01% chance means when watching, on television, how these scientists follow a launch with bated breaths. Hoping.

?You may have come across the information that Nokia rejected Android, Blockbuster rejected Netflix and Yahoo missed the chance to own both Facebook and Google. From a purely business outlook, I am sure Nokia and Blockbuster must have looked at the projected outcome of these ventures and most likely realized they only had a 0.01% chance of creating business value. They were not wrong. Based on the outlook of their times and the perspective they had. But we all know how the story turned out. Come to think of it, we may not realize it, but these rejections were a great blessing to the world as it protected the innovative spirits of Android and Netflix founders, from being subjected to the mindset that eventually brought down Nokia and Blockbuster.

So, with AI running the show, in lets say company recruitment, how many good potential employees do we lose? How often does the chance to witness miracles bypass us because we no longer listen to the voice within? If AI was to predict the future of a younger Albert Einstein, so that his education could be funded, what do you think would have been the outcome?

I am in no way advocating for making AI subservient to the unscientific methods of human intuition. I am just reminding us that there is a zone beyond all ML models; it’s in prayers, it’s in hope, it’s in the belief in karma, it’s in the human faith in God, it’s in compassion. This is the 0.01% zone that comes after all the models have been trained and optimized. It is what makes us human in the age of AI.

0.01% is a very small chance, but a lot of miracles are found there.