Before I even start, let's be clear: there are an awful lot of things currently being bundled under the "AI" banner, most of which of neither artificial nor intelligent.
So when I'm talking about AI here, I'm talking about what's being marketed to the masses as AI. This generally doesn't include the more traditional subjects of machine learning or image recognition, which I've often seen relabelled as AI.
But back to the title: is the modern thing called AI worthwhile?
Whatever it is, AI can do some truly remarkable things. That isn't something you can argue against. It can do some truly stupid and hopelessly wrong things as well.
But where does this good stuff fit in? Are businesses really going to benefit by embracing AI?
Well, yes, up to a point. There's a lot of menial work that can be handed off to an AI. It might be able to do it cheaper than a human.
The first snag is Jevon's paradox; by making menial tasks cheaper, a business simply opens the door to larger quantities of menial tasks, so it saves no money and its costs might even go up.
To be honest, though, I would have to say that if you can hand a task off to an AI, is it worth doing in the first place?
That's the rub, yes you might be able to optimise a process by using AI, but you can optimise it much more by eliminating it entirely.
(And you then don't have to pay extra for someone to come along and clean up after the AI has made a mess of it.)
It's not just the first level of process you need to look at. Take the example of summarising meetings. It's not so much that you don't need the summary, but to start with you need to run meetings better so they don't need to be summarised, and even better, the meeting probably wasn't needed at all.
Put it another way: the AI will get you to a local minimum of cost, but not to a global minimum. Worse, as AI gets cheaper and more widely used, that local optimisation makes it even harder to optimise the system globally.
So yes, I'm not convinced that much of the AI currently being rammed down our throats has any utility. It will actively block businesses in the pursuit of improvements, and the infatuation with current trendy AI will harm the development of useful AI.
