Hello, welcome to another rendition of mamak table talks. For our Muslim friends, Salam Ramadhan Al Mubarak.

This week, let’s talk about AI. Artificial Intelligence.

I know there’s so much ground to cover in AI – there’s too much to talk about, it’s ever evolving as we speak. For today, let’s talk about the creatives – or part of it anyway.

I’m sure you’ve read about AIs doing many things, most recently, I’ve read one about AI attempting to name colours  – attempt, being the operative word – to hilarious results. So research scientist and neural network hobbyist Janelle Shane decided it was a good idea to train AI to name colours.

Well the results were hilarious. In fact Shane has a tendency to play around with neural network to do things like naming bands, and those came with interesting results too. This isn’t the first time we had a great laugh at AI attempting creative works. Remember when it attempted to write a screenplay?

So, AI is still a bit out from doing creative work, like naming things, making a film. Or perhaps you remember Google’s attempt at creating art, resulting in a really creepy looking, trippy and nightmare inducing images. Maybe you thought about how it tried to draw but the drawing turned out to be some form of hybrid pig and lorry?

We all have a great laugh – but these are all progress in AI that could shape the future. At current, there has been much progress in systematic operations, as we constantly see on reports talking about fully autonomous cars, or assistants understanding natural language, or AI coding a page based on a visual screenshot of a UI. In terms of works that require precision, AI is progressing in leaps and bounds. It’s not 100%, but it’s more than half way there.

Sure, there are a lot of worry when it comes to the question of “Will AI replace me in my work?”. However, as we begin to see the industry develop, it becomes more apparent that AI, while having the potential to take over many aspects of our lives; function better as an additional aid to existing jobs. In terms of coding for example – programmers can spend less time writing codes that fit a certain function, and spend more time in more creative solutions to build on what the AI already can pick up. In fact, some in the industry recognises AI not as Artificial Intelligence, but Augmented Intelligence – with the purpose of enriching and adding to the value of work.

One thing’s for sure, the movies on your screens, colour naming, or even news written on this website won’t be done by a robot any time soon. We’ll still laugh along at the wondrous and hilarious attempts though.

What do you think?

As much ground as we can cover, we will still be barely scratching the surface – so we do welcome your opinions and discussion! Keep the conversation going – that’s what mamaks are for! Don’t worry, we have plenty discussions around AI in the future – what with autonomous driving and all being the future. We will revisit this topic many many times over the course of the next several years perhaps.

Till then, selamat berbuka!