"Artificially Intelligent" by David Eliot

If you’re weary of being bombarded by claims and concerns over AI, you need to hear David Eliot talk about the subject. The author of Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI is “the story of how artificial intelligence was born from human longing, grief, and ambition. It’s the story of the humans at the forefront of this field, from Hinton to Lovelace, Turing to Altman,” he said.As a researcher at the University of Ottawa, Eliot has been working on AI since 2019, while acknowledging that research on the subject began earnestly in 2012. When asked what books someone might want to read to understand AI better, Eliot said that’s a difficult question to answer. “I never know where to tell them to start. That’s not to say that there aren’t great books on the topic. There are. But I find that a lot of the books on the market right now focus on the future—they focus on the doom and gloom potential of AI, and not how it works, or how it is affecting us now,” he said.Human Compatible by Stuart Russell is one book that Eliot holds in high esteem. “It was published in 2019, so it may be a little dated. AI tends to move quickly,” he said.Eliot said that AI has already made its mark in the fields of education and medicine. “AI, when implemented properly, can be a tool to help us achieve more of our human potential,” he said.“When asked to deal with complex social problems with undefined cultural variance, (AI) can get a little whacky. But in a game with defined rules, it tends to be really good. Medicine fits beautifully into this category. Reading image scans, triaging based on reported symptoms, scheduling surgeries, and providing simulated training—AI has a lot of potential in healthcare,” said Eliot.The author acknowledged that AI has already had an impact on employment. “People have lost jobs,” he said. But Eliot said that some of the companies that reduced staff to adopt AI have paid a price as a result.“I strongly believe that AI has more transformational power than any technology since the steam engine. But we are in the early days, and it is still unclear what this change will look like. The important thing is that we as a society get to decide what this change will look like,” said Eliot.