I’m baaaack! This blog still exists! It’s been a hot minute1, eh?
Do I have a hundred blog ideas for this blog that went half-written and are saved somewhere in draft form? Absolutely. Am I going to revisit some of them? Eh, maybe. Life is busy.
Case in point: my older son is now old enough to watch Star Wars 🥳 We watched the Skywalker Saga movies in chronological release order, and now we’re watching The Mandalorian, as you may have gleaned from the title. So what does this have to do with AI?
Mando does not like Droids
In the Star Wars universe, artificial intelligence largely manifests as droids. Some are humanoid like C-3PO, some are not (shoutout to Gonk), and some are a hybrid, like IG-11. Without spoiling anything, the Mandolorian is a bounty hunter who loathes droids generally. He hates IG-units specifically as they were also bounty hunters and were designed, literally, to kill. Mando also works with an Ugnaught, Kuill, who can fix anything and has been known to reprogram droids, including these killer IG-units, to be docile house servants. Mando, however, has a really hard time trusting droids.
AI as Droids 🤖
So what the heck does any of this have to do with the current explosion of AI in the tech world? We were watching The Mandalorian this weekend, and in a conversation with Kuill, the Ugnaught said something I can’t get out of my head: “Droids are not good or bad, they are neutral reflections of those who imprint them.” His point is that for Mando to hate on droids generally is foolish because they’re simply computers, and it’s the people who programmed them who are responsible for their behavior. So it’s really people who are the problem 💡
AI is not good or bad…
So the real-world analogy here is that AI is neither good nor bad, it simply reflects who is programming it. Well, that’s cool! Except it’s also terrifying because sometimes people suck and make life harder for each other. AI2 itself isn’t scary - it’s the intentions of the people creating the AI that we have to worry about.
Furthermore, the data is really the key as in most things. The data being used for AI is literally… the internet. It’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s got research papers and Shakespeare and novels and social media and political ramblings. It reflects our biases: sexism, racism, xenophobia. It reflects our best qualities too, capturing how funny and smart and inventive humans are. The data that feeds AI is a reflection of us as a human race, broken down into super-cool math, and put back together as something that feels like a person but isn’t. It’s able to imitate human qualities, phrasing, and conversational styles, but ultimately it’s still just an algorithm.
Is Mando right?
Mando doesn’t trust droids, and maybe he’s right not to. Maybe deep down he knows that people aren’t always good, and so droids aren’t always good. And if you’ve been literally shot at by a droid… that’s a fair response 🤔
AI scares a lot of people. A lot of people don’t understand AI at all, and yet feel absolutely comfortable speaking about it, which is annoying. We’re at a really interesting inflection point in technology that has the potential to change everything, and that can be unnerving when it’s something so complex that only a few deeply nerdy nerds seem to really get.
Never stop learning, nerds! 🤓
The key, therefore, is to educate, educate, educate.
Let’s educate each other and others to make sure we all understand how this technology revolution affects us. I see a lot of folks out there who are talking about AI but clearly haven’t done their research (ugh no Jon Stewart, you can do better). My parents’ neighbor is terrified of the grocery store robot, but I spoke with her about it and now she (sort of) understands what it can and cannot do and is hopefully a little less afraid.
Start ‘em young! The more we can educate our kids about AI and data, and the more we can keep trying to push a diverse pipeline of kids through the educational system into computer science and data, the more likely we are to build more inclusive AI that reflects a broader human experience 🫶
And lastly, educate yourself. I am not an AI expert, but I’m learning and there are a lot of excellent resources out there to learn from. And if you haven’t noticed, nerds love to nerd out about nerdy things so please reach out if you’d like to discuss more!
Thanks for reading - talk to you in 2.5 years or maybe sooner if we’re lucky!
Or 900+ days 😬
When I say AI here, I’m talking mostly about ChatGPT and similar. Yes, there are other kinds of deep learning that use more specialized datasets, but let’s stick with what people use in their lives right now. Once we have droids in our homes I’ll write another blog, OK?