Oh, what beautiful irony…

Yesterday I wrote about how exciting it is to be alive today, as we’re at a point in time where 10 years from now thanks to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence we will no longer recognise our current way of living. I guess I sort of forgot about the struggle during the 10 years inbetween that will have to get us there…

Yesterday right after I had written my spark, I got into a chat discussion with a customer care representative of Safaricom, the dominant telco in Kenya. I tried to tell her that I wasn’t able to take up an offer they send me because the automated sequence of action steps was mixed up with another offer. In short, I asked her to take note that there was a glitch in their computer algorithm they needed to fix. The repeated (human) answer I got: “we regularly change our discount offers”. Yes, so? 

I fear she didn’t understand there is a difference between back-end coding of what the customer will see (by developers) and the marketing department coming up with the offers.

SPARK OF THE DAY

I understand, technology especially spacey ones like machine learning have an air of “too complex” over them. Where Elon Musk fears machines to become evil, I personally fear humans not even wanting to understand the basics.

Please, just because something is called artificial intelligence, doesn’t mean you should stop using human intelligence – on the contrary! Don’t trust technology to get things right, it’s (still) humans feeding computers with data, rules and algorithms!

On how algorithms work for non-techies:  https://computer.howstuffworks.com/what-is-a-computer-algorithm.htm