Book Review: Smart Until It’s Dumb by Emmanuel Maggiori

Written by For The Novel Lovers on March 10, 2023. Posted in Current News

The introduction sets out what Maggiori intends to do with the book, which is two main things, how current AI works, what it can and can’t do and a real look inside the businesses and industries that are using and developing AI technology.

The first chapter looks into the machine learning era, Maggiori first breaks down the various AI booms that have happened first in the 60s and then in the 80s before bringing us to the most recent boom in the 2010s. the first two AI booms led to so-called AI Winters because of the lack of resources and the technology available to the time but that changed in the early 2010s since technology had advanced alongside our understanding of technology.

Maggiori then breaks down what machine learning is with its pros and cons and its limitations. It was interesting to learn that despite being able to carry out actions by itself AI needs to be assisted with its datasets otherwise it will be unable to perform its primary task which means for things like self-driving cars they might actually be damn near impossible since the technology would always need to be supervised unless these barriers can be overcome.

In chapter 2, Maggiori begins looking into deep learning and its dangers. Deep learning takes aspects of machine learning and develops on them and we use it for many things including image and video analysis and natural language processing.

Maggiori goes into depth about what deep learning is and how it differs and builds on machine learning which is a little complex to follow even in layman’s terms if you aren’t familiar with technology and the way it works but once you get the hang of it things make sense.

This is the foundation of the book as it understand the potential and potential dangers and limitations of AI you need to understand how it works and functions of a fundamental level.

In chapter 3, Maggiori begins to look at how smart AI actually is. AI is both incredibly smart and stupid at the same time and when you break it down the distinction between smart and stupid is a lot clearer in terms of AI.

For things like number plate recognition AI only needs instruction on the identification of letter and number where as for language translation there are more areas for mistakes. Maggiori uses two brilliant examples here, first take words that have more than one meaning like pen which can mean writing pen or holding pen.

When trying to translate the words individually the AI isn’t able to distinguish between the two pens without context. Even without context if the reference words are separated then the AI still fails to provide the correct translation of the words.

The second is in image recognition, when an AI was presented the two pictures, one of a cow in a field and one of a cow on the beach and asked to categories items in the images it had surprising results. For the cow in the field “cow” was the first tag the AI gave the image but the AI was unable to tag “cow” with the beach image.

This is because AI relies on looking for patterns to assign tags to the images and cows are commonly associated with grass so in the pictures where there was a cow but no grass the AI was unable to form the connection between the animal and the environment.

In chapter 4, Maggiori begins looking at some of the current practical applications of AI starting with AI in business. In this section Maggiori uses a lot of his own personal experiences with AI in business which was both hilarious and terrifying.

Hilarious because the sheer stupidity of some of the people attempting to develop and work with Ai was immense and his comments on why these problems happen made it even better.

However, it was terrifying because these levels of stupidity very much exist in business today and nothing is really being done about them which makes working in the industry or coming into the industry a daunting task for most unless you have the knowledge and experience to overcome these hurdles.

One disturbing thing that Maggiori discusses is the censorship of their work in various different companies because the results aren’t what the executives wanted and the blatant lies he has been told over the years when being sought out or applying for positions and this shouldn’t be allowed to continue yet it does.

In chapter 5, Maggiori looks at the uses of AI in research. Maggiori draws on his own experience during his PhD and explains that tricks are often used to exaggerate and manipulate results which has become increasingly common and these tricks are taught to others behind the scenes creating a much larger problem.

During his PhD, Maggiori personally witnessed how cherry-picking the result data to publish can have a much wider, negative impact than many people expect and what that means for the wider scientific community and I completely agree that it needs to stop but that can’t be done unless the problem of the pressure put on researchers to produce wanted results in exchange for funding is also dealt with and this creates a never ending circle without a solution at the moment but it is beginning to change as people are beginning to fight back and the lies and deceit in the scientific communities.

In chapter 6, Maggiori turns to the philosophical questions about whether we should be looking to AI to do jobs that can easily be done by humans currently with much higher accuracy and dependency.

Maggiori delves into the question of consciousness and what makes a sentient being and whether or not AI can actually be developed to the point it could become conscious and what that would mean.

The conclusion of the books makes me think that AI technology is far less advanced than people lead us to believe and compared to a human some AI have less functionality and problem solving skills than a toddler but others that require less complicated data input are more advanced and take over many minor tasks like number plate recognition as was mentioned earlier.

This was definitely worth the read and if Maggiori write a more in-depth version of this book I will definitely pick it up.

To see more, and how to purchase this book, click here forthenovellovers

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