Targeting AI

AI: good and evil in the movies, and in reality

Whether AI is good and helpful or evil and dangerous is the stuff of endless debate in tech circles during this year's "generative AI moment."
In the movies, though, it's been pretty consistent: AI is the kind of malevolent force as embodied the HAL 9000 computer in the 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But CX analyst Liz Miller of Constellation Research, who recently wrote a blog about AI and the movies and Salesforce, says AI should be seen as more like Meryl Streep's helpful assistant in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada.
Andy, the human assistant played by Anne Hathaway, whispers useful information about a prospective customer in the Streep character's ear -- and Miller thinks we should let AI technology do the same.
Indeed, it already is in some ways, in the form of digital assistants and generative AI-supported systems such as Microsoft's Copilot and Salesforce's various GPT tools.
"There's this fallacy that AI was going to take everything over, when in reality what AI needed to do was take over the stuff that we did not have the capacity to do in the time that we had to do it," Miller said on TechTarget Editorial's Targeting AI podcast.
"I think that's where we're starting to see AI take shape. And that's what I meant by that analogy," Miller added. "There's nothing wrong with HAL 9000. It's a great villain."
Meanwhile, beyond AI and the movies, Miller touches on other topics during the podcast, including the fast-moving saga of the X social media platform (formerly known as Twitter). For her, the AI story there is not about X itself but about what happens with mercurial X owner Elon Musk's nascent AI venture, xAI.
Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's enterprise AI, business analytics, data management, customer experience and unified communications coverage areas. Esther Ajao is a TechTarget news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Together, they host the "Targeting AI" podcast series.
 

Tesla, federal highway officials deficient on autonomous vehicle safety: an interview with industry analyst Sam Abuelsamid

Sam Abuelsamid thinks Tesla's driver assist technology is unsafe.
The mobility ecosystem analyst at Guidehouse Insights is a vocal critic of the electric vehicle giant's AI-powered "Autopilot" technology.
A former mechanical engineer, automotive journalist and Ford and General Motors employee, Abuelsamid also charges that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has grossly undervalued safety considerations for self-driving and partially self-driving vehicles.
While Abuelsamid acknowledges that Tesla has advanced society's views on driving technology by appealing to consumers and popularizing electric vehicles, he also refuses to call such vehicles "autonomous." Instead, he refers to them as "automated," because, as he points out, few fully driverless vehicles are on the road.
In addition, Abuelsamid contends that Tesla has tried to do safety "on the cheap" by relying on cameras only to power Autopilot features and not using considerably more expensive sensor arrays.
"I think they've been utterly reckless and irresponsible in their approach to automated driving by putting experimental software in the hands of average consumers who are not trained in how to properly test and evaluate this kind of safety critical software," Abuelsamid says
Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle technology vendors including Cruise, Waymo, Zoox and Motional are using multiple types of sensors, he says.
One Tesla fan and investor, Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, has disputed Tesla safety critics. He argues that autonomously driven Teslas will get increasingly safer with hundreds of thousands of consumers driving and testing out the beta version of the popular carmaker's full self-driving capability.
But Abuelsamid faults NHTSA for failing to effectively oversee safety aspects of autonomous vehicle technology vendors.
"I think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been negligent in not doing more to require sharing of data from these test vehicles to build an understanding of how these things function," he says. "At a minimum what we need is the electronic equivalent of what we have to do as humans to get a driver's license."
Go to TechTarget News for reports on autonomous vehicle technology and other AI developments.

An Interview with AI Expert Michael Bennett of Northeastern University

Our guest is Michael Bennett, director of education curriculum and business lead for responsible AI at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. Bennett, a practicing lawyer, holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic University in Philosophy -- Science, Technology and Society. Bennett is also an occasional TechTarget contributing writer.
During the 45-minute episode, Bennett discusses the impact of New York City's new Law 144 governing the use of AI in automated employment decision tools, which he helped draft before it went into effect on July 5, 2023. The local law is likely to have a wide-reaching effect on employers across the U.S. if only because a large number of corporations are based in or have a significant presence in the country's largest city, Bennett says.
The law prohibits "employers and employment agencies from using an automated employment decision tool unless the tool has been subject to a bias audit within one year of the use of the tool, information about the bias audit is publicly available, and certain notices have been provided to employees or job candidates." Law 144 has already spun off a thriving new niche of law and audit firms providing services to employers to comply with the measure,
Bennett also zeroes in on the hottest topic in the tech world at the moment: generative AI. He talks about various efforts, including projects he's involved in, to rein in, regulate and harness for effective use large language models and the AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard that have become ubiquitous in the business and consumer spheres over the last year.
On another front, AI and the arts, Bennett discusses the latest developments in copyright law as it relates to AI and also touches on the Hollywood TV writers strike and writers' concerns about generative AI systems taking over their jobs.
Podcast intro/outro music by Six Umbrellas: "Joker." This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.