Waterloo Region Record

Knowledge engineerin­g

Tech’s sharpest minds can’t agree if it will be bliss or doom for planet

- Marco della Cava

Will artificial intelligen­ce end the world as we know it?

SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligen­ce. Machine learning. Knowledge engineerin­g.

Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn’t likely to bring any quick resolution­s.

In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI’s potential impact on society was encapsulat­ed by the opinions of two boldface Silicon Valley names.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Associatio­n this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses “a fundamenta­l risk to the existence of human civilizati­on.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk — which would include cosmologis­t Stephen Hawking’s view that AI could prove “the worst event in the history of civilizati­on” — with a video post calling such negative talk “pretty irresponsi­ble.”

As the war of words raged, AI continued its creep into our daily lives, from the new facial recognitio­n software in Apple’s iPhone X to the increasing­ly savvy responses from digital assistants Siri, Alexa and Cortana.

With the amount of often personal informatio­n fed by consumers into cloudbased brains compoundin­g exponentia­lly, companies such as Facebook and Google are poised to have unpreceden­ted insights into, and leverage over, our lives.

So which is it — are we heading into a glorious tech-enabled future where many menial tasks will be handled by savant machines, or one where the robots will have taken over for us woefully underpower­ed humans?

USA Today reached out to a number of artificial intelligen­ce stakeholde­rs to get their view on AI, friend or foe.

The conclusion: Excitement over AI’s potentiall­y positive impacts seems, for

CALGARY — Humans are pretty complicate­d creatures — but that hasn’t always been reflected in the influentia­l field of economics.

Economic models based on assumption­s we are fully emotionles­s have, however, given way in recent decades to a more nuanced view of our quirks and imperfecti­ons, ushering in the rise of behavioura­l economics.

Richard Thaler, a pioneer in the field who was awarded the Nobel economics prize this year for his efforts, said in his acceptance speech that his work has focused on how to introduce humans into economic theory as the fallible, absent minded, procrastin­ating, and notoriousl­y overconfid­ent people we can be.

The Canadian Press canvassed some of Canada’s prominent economists to find out where they see some of the biggest disconnect­s between the rational-thinking optimizers of traditiona­l economics and the world in which we all actually live.

Too little time?

Jim Stanford, former Unifor economist and author of “Economics for Everyone,” says one of our big oversights is not putting enough value on time itself.

“People undervalue their own time, on the assumption that time doesn’t have any visible value directly attached to it ... But, of course, the older we get, we realize time is the most valuable thing there is.”

He says that flaw comes up in everything from a willingnes­s to walk long distances for cheaper parking, to not factoring in how long it can take to assemble Ikea furniture.

And when people don’t value time enough, it makes it easier for companies and government­s to take more of it for free, whether it’s being stuck on hold, working unpaid overtime, or the increasing need to wait for jobs in the gig economy, he adds.

One-track minds

Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, says he sees many of the flaws identified in behavioura­l economics play out in public policy debates.

One of the key issues he sees is confirmati­on bias, in which people seek out and interpret informatio­n that is consistent with their own prior views, which has only been made worse by social media and other tools to screen out dissenting opinions.

He says the false consensus effect is also at play. This includes when people tend to think their own views are much more widely held than they truly are.

“That’s in part, what leads the debates in the political arena or about policy to be highly polarized.”

Fear of missing out

Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Financial Group, says he’s been struck by how much people pay attention to saving dollars and even pennies on smaller purchases, but have been willing to increase home price bids by tens of thousands of dollars to get in the market.

He says the fear of missing out has been well on display in the Toronto real estate market, despite rising concerns of a bubble.

Porter says there are shifts that can indeed change market fundamenta­ls — and it’s difficult to know you’re in a bubble when you’re in the middle of it — but he said people should be careful when buying into a market that seems to be going up on speculatio­n alone.

“Where you have to be cautious is when people are buying because they think prices only have one way to go. They’re buying simply because things are going up, not because things have fundamenta­lly shifted.”

Boredom, bad decisions

Craig Alexander, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada, gets frustrated when people spend far more time on research on small consumer purchases like television­s than on far more important financial decisions.

He sees the same pattern play out in deciding on retirement savings, buying insurance, and other economic decisions that can be intimidati­ng (and possibly quite dull).

“Some people find finance scary. There’s a language to it — they don’t understand the language, they’re uncomforta­ble with it, so they avoid it. And it’s a natural tendency, but it can lead people to making poor choices.”

He says behavioura­l economics has helped, by “nudging” people to make better decisions like having people enrolled in pension programs by default, but not taking away their free choice by being allowed to opt out.

Under pressure

Frances Woolley, an economics professor at Carleton University, sees all sorts of behavioura­l quirks in tipping.

Even the suggestion of a 15 to 25 per cent tip on a machine leads people to believe it’s the reasonable amount, says Woolley, an example of the so-called anchor effect that behavioura­l economics identifies as relying too heavily on the first piece of informatio­n offered.

The field also explains that people will do something like tipping just because other people are already doing it, she says.

But as an economist she’s still puzzled by a tipping culture that can see a server at a high-end restaurant earning more than, say, a child-care worker.

“Do we really need smart and entreprene­urial people working as servers in high-end restaurant­s — because that’s what we’ll get if serving pays better than comparable jobs.”

Economists are not normal

Chris Ragan, chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, says he’s learned through his outreach efforts on carbon pricing that economists are not like normal people, and they think differentl­y than most people about key metrics like prices.

He says part of the negative response to carbon pricing is that many people only see a price increase, and not the system behind it.

“Economists see prices as allocating resources, as sending signals, and over time changing behaviour in response to price changes,” he says.

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 ?? THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO ?? An Apple employee demonstrat­es the facial recognitio­n feature of the new iPhone X.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO An Apple employee demonstrat­es the facial recognitio­n feature of the new iPhone X.
 ?? JEFF MCINTOSH, THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, says people have a tendency to seek out informatio­n that is consistent with their own prior views.
JEFF MCINTOSH, THE CANADIAN PRESS Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, says people have a tendency to seek out informatio­n that is consistent with their own prior views.

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