Drilling down on the artificial intelligence (AI) investment story is becoming critical as stock markets find excuses for ever greater enthusiasm. Any little story with an AI theme is driving up stock prices, assisted by the billions pledged for the building of data centres to handle all of our future searches.
The share price of Fanuc, a Japanese robotic company, jumped 9 per cent on the opening bell on Tuesday after it announced a tie-up with AI darling Nvidia. AI is likely to be a great tool, but the market is currently borrowing performance, revenues and profits from the future, much the same as it did in the dotcom bubble of 2000.
AI is under heavy scrutiny at the moment, partly because people are looking ahead and seeing a time when many jobs will disappear. We can look to the history of the Industrial Revolution and see that some new roles are likely to appear after the short-term pain. Indeed, some companies are already trying to shed labour even though AI customer service is barely a work in progress.
So-called virtual assistants are slow and error-strewn. Apps are often difficult to use with intractable logic for anyone older than 15. Programmers focus their efforts on the sales part, but it is nearly impossible to find somebody if you need after-sales help. If you are lucky enough to find a contact number, you are likely to be told that the information can be found on the website. If I could find it on the website, I wouldn’t have called.
This form of AI is fundamentally a clever form of predictive text that takes the search concept and uses probabilities to forecast what is likely to come next, presenting it as fact. However, the human mind is still better at discerning the nuances of a topic and will be for decades.
With due modesty (because I know the answers), I tested the different AI apps by using the search string “Richard Harris Hong Kong”. I received a wide range of answers, mostly with errors and one or two being definitely untrue, sometimes dangerously so. AI might be useful in writing a novel or screenplay, but you would not want it to write a PhD thesis, a legal case or commentary on the news.