Artificial stupidity as a DBA limitation of artificial intelligence

“Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity” ― Albert Einstein

What about introducing Artificial Intelligence into the database to an extent it tunes itself into all possible dimensions?

You have probably either seen the question above or have already asked yourself if that was at all possible. On Ask Tom, John from Guildford wrote the following:

As for Artificial Intelligence, well Artificial Stupidity is more likely to be true. Humanity is not privy to the algorithm for intelligence. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of dealing with machine generated code knows that software is no more capable of writing a cohesive system than it is of becoming self-aware.

Provided you’re not trying to be a cheap alternative to an automaton you just need to think. That one function alone differentiates us from computers, so do more of it. The most sublime software on the planet has an IQ of zero, so outdoing it shouldn’t be all that hard.

Stephen Hawking thinks computers may surpass human intelligence and take over the world. Fear artificial stupidity, not artificial intelligence!

Einstein is credited with saying (but it was probably Alexandre Dumas or Elbert Hubbard who deserve the recognition): “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”

Explore artificial stupidity (AS) and/or read Charles Wheelan’s book Naked Statistics to understand this kind of AI danger. By the way, according to Woody Allen, 94.5% of all statistics are made up!

So what are the limitations of AI? Jay Liebowitz argues that “if intelligence and stupidity naturally exist, and if AI is said to exist, then is there something that might be called “artificial stupidity?” According to him three of these limitations are:

Ability to possess and use common sense

Development of deep reasoning systems

Ability to easily acquire and update knowledge

But does artificial intelligence use a database in order to be an artificial intelligence? Few very interesting answers to that question are give by Douglas Green, Jordan Miller and Ramon Morales, here is a summary:

Although AI could be built without a database, it would probably be more powerful if a database were added. AI and databases are currently not very well integrated. The database is just a standard tool that the AI uses. However, as AI becomes more advanced, it may become more a part of the database itself.

I don’t believe you can have an effective Artificial Intelligence without a database or memory structure of some kind.

While it is theoretically possible to have an artificial intelligence without using a database, it makes things a LOT easier if you can store what the AI knows somewhere convenient.

As Demystifying Artificial Intelligence explains, AI hass been embedded into some of the most fundamental aspects of data management, making those critical data-driven processes more celeritous and manageable.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is worth looking into and Oracle are also ready for business with AI.

Matt Johnson, a Navy pilot turned AI researcher, at a conference this simmer by saying that one of the places we are not making a lot of advances is in that teaming, in that interaction (of humans and AI) – Artificial Stupidity: When Artificial Intelligence + Human = Disaster

Bottom line: if AI uses a database, then the intelligent database should be at least autonomous and have most tasks automated but not relying on artificial stupidity as a DBA limitation of artificial intelligence. Whatever it means… I do not want to curb your enthusiasm but we need to first fill in the skills gap: we need data engineers who understand databases and data warehouses, infrastructure and tools that span data cleaning, ingestion, security, predictions. And in this aspect Cloud is critical and a big differentiator.

P.S. Is Artificial Intelligence Progress a Bubble? was published 4 days after this blog post.