Five ways bots beat people

Suppose you have $100 million to invest today. You're given a choice. You can fund the education of ten smart adolescents. Or you can put your money on ten AI algorithms. If maximizing monetary return is your sole criterion, which investment do you make?

With this as a framing question, consider five ways in which AI bots beat humans.

First, bots don't get distracted. This is the primary reason they’re on the verge of making autonomous vehicles a reality. Driver bots have quicker reflexes than humans. They can see in the dark as humans cannot. When they run into puzzling situations they pull over and ask for directions from home base. But most of all, they pay attention to what they are doing. For many humans, driving is one part of a multitasking endeavor. They look at their phone too long and drive through a stop sign or off the road. Driver bots aren't perfect, and for some while their imperfections will continue to make news. But they’re already safer than human drivers in many situations. Their advantage will continue to grow.

Which leads to a second reason for betting on the bots. They get sharper and faster with each passing year. For humans the opposite is true soon beyond adolescence. Human brain power maximizes in early adulthood, which is why mathematicians and chess masters peak early. The AI algorithms continue to get better: faster, more accurate, more capable. Almost certainly they will continue to do so.

A third reason is that bots don't get emotionally invested in their hallucinations. At a basic level, this is because they don't have emotions. Humans do. And humans are known allow their emotions to cloud their thinking. When facts contradict human-held beliefs, the facts are often more likely to be denied or ignored than the beliefs are to be changed. When religious belief entails an apparent violation of the laws of the natural world, the concept of miracle is invoked. When political belief requires the rejection of scientific data, conspiracy theories provide a way out. AI bots, having no skin in the game— again, because of having no skin at all, physical or metaphorical—have no such resistance to changing their minds.

A fourth reason is a corollary of the third. Bots have no pecuniary reason for interpreting the world in one way or another. A medical scientist interpreting data from a clinical trial funded by a pharmaceutical company, and on the payroll of that company, is tempted to put a thumb on the scale. Bots don't have thumbs, nor do they have mortgages to pay off or kids to put through college. To be sure, the humans overseeing the bots have such concerns. But that's all the more reason to cut them out of the loop as much as possible.

A fifth and final reason is that originality is overrated. This is the final hill where humans will take their stand against the bots. Yes, the bots may be adept at taking a phrase from here, a word from there, an image from somewhere else, and repackaging it all in a flashy way—in the way a DJ samples and mixes music. But somebody—some human—has to compose the music in the first place.

Yet how do the critics of the bots think humans compose music? No one knows for sure. But the best guess is that humans do what the DJs do, only subtly and unconsciously (sometimes not subtly enough to avoid lawsuits for copyright infringement.)

“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote King Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes. Or maybe it wasn't Solomon. Anyway, he didn't think up the idea himself, unless it wasn't true. But he's the one always cited. Benjamin Franklin is often quoted in his persona as Poor Richard, but Franklin never claimed more than a knack for editing and polishing the nuggets of others.

These are ways in which bots are better than people. There are definitely ways in which people are better than bots. That can be a subject for a future essay.

But for now, if I had the hundred million, I know where I'd place my bet.