Humans Will Always Be More Important Than Machines
'People... people will never go out of business.' - Michael Scott
Last week, I did a piece of analysis for social media analytics company, Brandseye. Their intelligence tool is based on big data collection - but also human insight, in the form of their signature Crowd.
Their success - in predicting Brexit, and coalition governments in the SA local elections - overturns some prevailing sentiment in the tech and business worlds - that machines are now cleverer than people, and might take over society, like something out of Terminator or The Matrix.
What their Crowd does is sort through big data, adding human insight, in the shape of an awareness of irony, narrative, and humour, to the evaluation of media information.
In my piece I just did for them, I showed how their system will always beat Watson, IBM's super computer, in understanding political data.
A few years back I did some research on AI for Fast Company magazines.
Intriguingly, I found that some of the best philosophers now believe the human mind is not material - in other words, not some function of an organic machine.
Therefore, AI, in the human sense, can never exist.
This is worth remembering: human consciousness is something unique in the universe. It is deeply mysterious. This truth should shape everything we do here on earth.
Even if the brain were not more complex chemically than any star, this would still be true - because people have souls, understand beauty, love and friendship.
In the words of my BrandsEye piece:
'Technology is vitally important in politics, business, and data analysis, but it should never be forgotten that both politics and business remain, at their heart, human pursuits, which always consist of language, narrative, irony and emotion.'