From the calculator to AI – the Digital Genie is out of the lamp – who gets to make the wishes?

Progress is unstoppable and relentless. I started work before hand held calculators existed, in a time when arithmetic; addition, subtraction, division and percentages were all performed either in your head or with pencil and paper or maybe a slide rule. But wind forward and how things have changed.

Initially maths salvation took the form of a usable everyday personal calculator a device that became reality 50 years ago with the launch of the Sharp EL-805 a device that wowed the world in 1973 at a not inconsiderable cost of £143 ( USD $350) - at today’s value £1,557 ($2,041.38).

Over the course of that decade hand held calculators became the go to answer, transforming the way tens of millions of people did arithmetic. Engineers abandoned slide rules, business of all stripes and types gave up desktop calculating machines and replaced simple adding machines, a calculator became a fixture within millions of homes

By the start of the 1990s the pocket calculator was the unchallenged go to portable answer to arithmetic. But progress is relentless and its reign was initially challenged and has now largely been ended by the development of new multi tasking, fit in your pocket, hardware. By the mid 1990s the pocket PDA, by the mid 2,000s displaced by the appearance of what has become the all powerful Smart Phone. Today with no more than a basic £100 Android phone (1973 price adjusted cost around £6.50 or 4.5% of the actual 1973 price of the EL-805) in your pocket you have at your finger tips more computing power than the guidance computer in Apollo 11. You have access to not just the Internet, but also a calculator, maps, SatNav, GPS, the time in any country in the world and much, much more via a near endless library of Apps designed to answer all needs.

To this we can add AI chatbots to our list of digital servants, able to engage with us in human like exchanges, to the basket.

Compared to the calculators of 1973 digital resources, potential uses have expanded beyond calculation and access universal.

Basically for most activities thinking and understanding has become optional as we simply ask our digital servant and knowledge management a goal of those who deliver the answers received.

A thought on why this is perhaps not Nirvāṇa

By the dictionary "Knowledge" and "management" are nouns - words that represent a person, thing or concept, Used together "knowledge management" they are an unacountable noun - a name for a concept uncountable with numbers, without quantification..

But; by application within the digital arena they are as relevant as verbs - words used to describe action, or state of being. What if in say 1986, when calculators had well and truly established their position as the average person’s go to maths solution, the manufacturers had decided that the rules of arithmetic needed updating. That 2+2=5 or 12.5% of 60 = 8? How long would it have taken for that change to basic fact to achieve a position of acceptance by the general public with out even a shrug of their shoulders? Who actually checks the result presented to them by their all wise machines? Who calculates the percentage restaurant tip they add to the bill long hand? Who goes round the supermarket adding up the cost of their weekly shop with a pen and paper addition? How hard would it have really been for these manufacturers to have bent the basics of daily arithmetic and promote wider mathematics to a black art practiced only by an elite?

This thought planted, wind forward to today's emergence of AI Chat Bots. The Genie is now out of the lamp and its not going back into it.

For day to day needs Its now easier to simply ask Alexa, Siri etc for the answer to your question or queries or to make your purchase, or to command ChatGPT or AI of choice to write your work presentation, degree dissertation, historical essay school work, etc. ,than it is to engage brain and make the effort or learn the facts to create your content or direct your actions.

But these interactions are not the wishes the Genie of technology is bound to grant - you, the consumer, don't get to rub the lamp. The lamp is secure in the hands of the big tech companies and it is their wishes that the Genie has to answer.

These wishes are starting to to be made. The result of the first appearing with BT and IBM being but two of many major corporations announcing a potential loss of many tens of thousands of physical call centres and tertiary jobs to artificial intelligence solutions. A prospect that many governments are also eyeing with longing for the savings and extensions of control the introduction of AI solutions in replacement of expensive and difficult to manage humans.

The social consequences of this new step into the post industrial age of technological advancements decimation of employment put aside; If the human link in providing our services is removed how hard would it be for a malevolent actor amongst these international conglomerates and their governmental clients to start to rewrite history and shape a future that delivered their aims as their technology repeats their own “facts”, times uncountable, to a worldwide audience who accept the pronouncements that spout forth as truth and fact?

Its easy to see how history and one’s lived reality could become malleable; written in pencil not ink.

As a collective we are watching as bystanders as the interactions made with those who supply services, news and education are stating to be moved away from providing us with human interaction in work places, schools, colleges, customer support centres towards a faceless online interactive AI predictive environment. One that offers big gains for those who control. One that cuts out the cost of buildings, desks, chairs and human employment. One that does all of this whilst delivers the wished “computer says” resolutions, in a manner that the enquiring customer is increasingly blind to as the technologies mature and their abilities expand. Ultimately one that disenfranchises us as both consumers and citizens

This is happening today. The major corporations, governments and their providers are actively positioning to leaver the new AI technologies that are fed by and “learn from” the vast amounts of data these actors hold on our wants, needs, issues and desires.

This process of data collection, modelling and translation is basically a function of mathematics. If the data sets held are large enough the law of large numbers come to effect, the creation of predictive algorithms that appear to mimic human interactions possible and, the temptation to manipulate possibly irresistible.

“The law of large numbers” - in probability and statistics, states that as a sample size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population.

“Algorithm” - mathematics and computer science: a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations and data processing a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

“Chatbot” - a computer program that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand customer questions and automate responses to them, simulating human conversation.

“Manipulation” - to manage or influence skilfully, especially in an unfair manner: to manipulate people's feelings. to handle, manage, or use, especially with skill, in some process of treatment or performance: to adapt or change to suit one's own purpose or to one’s own advantage.

Deployed for own advantage these actions are one misstep from coercion. Coercion requires only that the perpetrator holds the power and will to act. The coercive force need not be physical it may simply deprive us of access, or rights or opportunity if we deviate from the planned norm

That power increasingly exists, but still lies largely dormant, with those who hold, process, aggregate and deploy the individuals data to give the ability to build big picture data models, of their consumer base or wider still the population as a whole, and the mathamatical ability to deploy the power of big numbers and AI algorithms. As the consumer or a citizen (if you like the target) our individual ability to avoid or frustrate this is to collectively realise the danger of manipulation and to value our lived reality over the alchemy of Artificial Intelligence and as one deny those with the potential power to direct, manipulate and in the end coerce, us the ability to act to shape and form our reality.

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”

at least that's what Albert Einstein believed – we would be foolish to allow him to be proved wrong by allowing those who hold the AI Genie’s lamp to make their wishes the framework of our reality.