Interview with David Asch Offers Insights On A.I.

In September my review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was published by the Medium publication Age of Awareness. What I especially like about the Medium community is the readiness to comment on stories, often adding new insights to something we initiated.

Though I only received one comment on my review I found it exceptionally insightful. Klara and the Sun is about A.I. and David Asch's review demonstrated his deeper understanding of the current status of Artificial Intelligence and where it is headed. I asked permission to pick his brain on this topic and he graciously accepted.

EN: What is your background and how did you come to take an interest in AI?

David Asch: I've had a long career as a software developer and as a leader of technology companies. In the late '80's, I worked for a government contractor alongside a team of Natural Language Processing (NLP) linguists and computer scientists. They worked on a DoD project trying to identify the few messages of concern from a plethora of communications they monitored. The NLP team was as arrogant as they were unsuccessful. It wasn't until the last ten years or so that Machine Learning using neural networks has enabled language processing and image processing to start living up to its vaunted potential. 

EN:  We’ve grown up in a world where “intelligent machines” keep getting smarter. Computers are everywhere. What is the difference between computers as we know them and AI?

DA: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the ability for a machine to learn any task as well as a human, has been the stuff of science fiction for a long time. Ray Kurzweil coined the term "the Singularity" as the point at which artificial intelligence becomes smarter than humans.  We're nowhere close to that point yet. Much of the AI-inspired smartness we see in our devices today are based on pattern and image recognition - like facial identification in lieu of a password or the leaps we've seen in machine language translation and voice recognition. 

EN: You mention the concern that AI will replace jobs. How do you see this playing out?

David Asch

DA: If you visit a factory today you'll often see more robots than humans. These robots aren't particularly intelligent but are a harbinger of the future.  AI will replace jobs that don't require humanity - the ability to interact with other humans. We already see the likelihood of AI replacing taxi and bus drivers in our lifetimes and possibly replacing us as drivers. AI is already used to help doctors identify cancerous tissue because it's better at it than humans. The immediate future will result in some job loss and some job modification to take advantage of AI. For example, AI technology may be used to drive a truck cross country, but a human may be needed to drive the final mile and will definitely be needed to handle the transfer of goods and bills of lading where people need to interact. Cardiologists may not need to develop the same expertise in reading EKGs because they'll have an AI assist; this may free them to spend more time interacting with patients.

EN: The Terminator films are based upon a future when the machines turn on the humans. It seems like the Internet-of-Things and global interconnectivity could make a malevolent AI a challenging and very real threat. Is this too far out to really happen?

DA: Elon Musk has sounded this alarm about the danger of malevolent machines. I agree that it's a danger, but it's so far away we'd do better to worry about imminent dangers like climate change. Ultimately, the builders of new AI technologies will be forced to self-govern and control the technology, like the scientists who created RNA sequencing technology. Otherwise, the government will step in and force regulation. 

It does seem that foot soldiers may become one of the jobs AI bots replace. The calculus of war will change when troops aren't on the ground fighting. 

EN:  Or equally disconcerting, a foreign power that uses AI to dismantle our power grids, Wall Street, health care and government systems….

DA: Big time. We're already seeing the beginnings of this with ransomware attacks on utilities. Cybersecurity is becoming a big business because so many systems are vulnerable to attack. There's no question that AI-fueled attacks will become a threat vector in the future.

Although it's interesting to focus on the negative effects of new technologies, it's also important to realize that the responsible deployment of these technologies will almost certainly improve our safety and health. 

EN: Thank you, David.

You can follow David Asch on Medium HERE: https://dasch804.medium.com/

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Related Links

The Importance of Klara and the Sun For Data Science Workers

Surviving AI by Calum Chace Is a Must Read for Those Who Plan to Be Here in the Future

A Visit with Futurist Calum Chace on his new book The Economic Singularity

Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun Is Another Stellar Achievement

Ernest Hemingway once made a dismissive remark about Nobel Prize winners in which he declared that once people win the prize they don't produce anything good or important again. (This is my paraphrase.) Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable Klara and the Sun proves that such pronouncements are absurd. 

Ishiguro demonstrates once again why he is considered one of the great writers of our time. The English language has a shortage of superlatives to describe the power of his prose, so I shan't even attempt it. 

When I was asked yesterday what genre he writes in, it seemed impossible to explain. Magical Realism? Literary Exceptionalism? Maybe "serious literary fiction" says it best. 

Good Morning America Book Club, NYTimes Bestseller, and Best Book selection by numerous others.... 

Ishiguro's stories are always original, the characters vividly drawn. Klara and the Sun is no exception. A writer's first task is to draw you in, and from the opening paragraphs you are hooked, willing to go wherever he plans to take you. For any reader seeking more than superficial escapism, Ishiguro's books always deliver a payoff. (I have to qualify this remark. In reading the Amazon reviews afterward, I see that a number of people disliked this story. I will give my reasons for liking it and recommending it.)

The novel is told in first person from the point of view of Klara, an AF, which is short for Artificial Friend. In other words, she is an intelligent robot that families can buy from a store downtown. The AFs are designed to befriend children and to be kind.

Part One
The story begins with 45 pages about life in the retail store for AFs. Klara is paired with Rosa, which gives the author a chance to show how Klara is extremely perceptive to such a degree that is unique for an AF. The AFs are solar powered, which explains Klara's unusual relationship to the sun. Eventually Josie comes into her life.

Part Two
The next 60 pages detail life with her new family. It is a three story house in the country. The Mother is a professional woman, Josie somewhere in her teens and Melania Housekeeper is the third member of the household. We learn that Josie had a sister who died, and that Josie herself is sickly so that everyone worries about her surviving. There is also a house next door and we soon get to know a boy named Rick. As the story progresses there are things we don't know but, as in a mystery novel, we feel their weight in the way Klara tells the story. 

Part Three 
The relationship between Josie and Rick is explored and challenged as their expectations for the future seem to collide with present realities. We learn more about Rick's family after Klara visits their house, and we see how much Josie's illness impacts nearly everyone around her.

Part Four
In this section we meet the scientist/artist Mr. Capaldi and Josie's father. There is a clash between each of the characters that turns pretty ugly. Issues regarding motivations, fears and a sense of impending doom color the atmosphere, yet Klara throughout has maintained a sense of irrational hope. 

Parts Five and Six
The last two sections of the book tie together a number of clues that have been sown throughout and answer the questions that may have been raised in the reader's mind. 

One of the themes in this and other Ishiguro stories has to do with what it means to be human. Loneliness is another recurring theme. The challenges presented by relationships are part of his stories as well -- misunderstandings, fear of being hurt, et.

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Kazuo Ishiguro. Creative commons.

Not all the reviewers at Amazon.com fell in love with this book, so I can't promise this is for you. For me, however, I not only read as a reader but as a writer as well. I get mesmerized by the manner in which a great writer weaves a spell on the reader. I am especially impressed when a writer creates a unique narrator and is consistent throughout for 250 pages and more. An example of this might be Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells a story, but the reader understands that the narrator is not reading things correctly.

In Klara, anxiety sets the tone from near the beginning. When she sees Josie in the store, will Josie come back? Will Josie recover from her illness? Will Rick and Josie live happily ever after in a world as broken as this? Will Klara fulfill her mission? As in real life, we never really know how things will turn out, so we have to keep following our path.

Maureen Corrigan of NPR described this as “one of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written….I'll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.”

Followers of this blog will know that I am a fairly big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro. People ask if he is a Japanese writer. The answer is that he was born in Nagasaki but grew up in England since age five. He's won numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Here are some of the posts I've written about his other books, as well as an interview about Dylan that appeared in a 2008 Paris Review. 

Ishiguro Again Shows His Mastery in Never Let Me Go

In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

A 3-Day Ride with Ryder: Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro On Dylan