Common sense: In the Age of AI
Koushik Banerjee
Entrepreneurial Product & Engineering Leader | Ex-Informatica, Texas Instruments, Siemens, Philips | Transforming Business Models through Product Innovation | IIM-C
Irrespective of education level (or lack of it), human intelligence is measured in terms of common sense. If there is a fire blazing few feet away, humans would stay away, or even move away from it. Similarly, if one is driving and the vehicle in front of you stops, you would also apply brakes.
Then there are irrational exuberance typical of a "viral" effect. Viral effects could be result of marketing and/or fear mongering followed by herd mentality kicking in. During early days of Covid, US was running out of toilet papers. While I understand sanitizers, face masks, PPE, I am yet to establish a correlation between toilet paper and Covid. We also see this in TikTok, Insta and other trends, where a certain way of wearing your top (in females), dancing / singing in a moving car caught on. The second viral trend let to few accidents.
Common sense is a big part of becoming humans, including the nuances of cultural intelligence - opening the door for a lady to pass, saying "thank you" and so on. Then there is Artificial Intelligence where human researchers are attempting to converge and match human intelligence.
This article was provoked by a Reuters article on Wars and its impact on Crude (oil) prices.
Traditionally if there was a war (of significance) price of crude oil would move up, with the expectation of more oil being used by 2 countries at war. The price movement becomes more significant, if one of the country has significant contribution to crude production or refinery operation. This was apparent in the Russia-Ukraine war that led to uptick in global crude prices considering Russia is a significant contributor to crude. Despite import ban from Western Europe, Russia continued to maintain its production volume with partners like China and India increasing their crude import for domestic consumption (and re-export of refined product). So while Russia-Ukraine war did lead to an initial uptick in crude prices, it stablized in 6 months as the situation starting lending more clarity on supply chain.
领英推荐
Crude and other global supply chain'd products are traded under commodity derivatives. And this is one area which has increasingly used algorithmic (intelligence) based trading. A 20 day moving average (DMA) is used to dictate buying or shorting commodities like Crude. So while the increase in crude prices at the start of Russia-Ukraine war was common sense, the drop when Iran attacks Israel is unfounded.
Summary of questions
Is it possible that with increased intelligence in the trading algos, common sense has been lost? Or, the algorithms have insights that are not commonly available considering Iran is a significant exporter of oil? Are we experience moving away from human common sense or are we truly graduating to higher intelligence, interpreting signals and correlation that we humans would have missed? Do we have a new way of discounting a certain event where the discounting factor is intelligently derived or maybe there is a human-in-the-loop who does this? Or maybe this is just a herd mentality - mistake in the algorithm of one trading firm which decided on a sell call resulted in all other trading algos re-enforcing the signal? We may never know what transpired and if this was the right call. As Artificial Intelligence becomes more pervasive, we will potentially experience effect-cause-effect syndrome instead of cause-effect. A down tick in crude prices could lead to new global events which may have even significant impact than the present war.
It is though imperative that as humans, we need to up our common sense to maintain peace and rational decision making as AI takes over more things in our life. If AI truly achieves AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), decision making may only more murkier (and black box). Let's hope for the best.
Director at Hanabi Technologies
2 个月Exploring AI Koushik Banerjee I’m sure you'll find Hana useful. She's more than just an ordinary AI bot—she's an assistant team member who can customize everything for you and function just like a real team member or an assistant for free!! Check out our website to learn more: https://hana.hanabitech.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=comment&utm_campaign=shamshad_outreaches