Artificial sweeteners—sounded good in theory, but now they are thought to be bad for us. Faux meat—real yecch. The synthesizer versus the electric guitar… c’mon be serious. Pleather, Naugahyde and any garment made out of recycled milk jugs, just awful. Ahh, but what about Artificial Intelligence? The exception to the rule that ‘artificial’ is not as good as ‘genuine,’ if the claims are to be believed. Surely AI will increase productivity while freeing humanity to reach for the stars, or perhaps make more and better Tik Tok videos.
As touched on before by writers infinitely more dedicated (and talented) than myself, the profession of Surveying is a unique blend of Mathematics, Law, and Art. It has been this way since the Age of Reason, when Surveying textbooks, all replete with a strong dose of Philosophy, started appearing and inspiring thinkers like Thomas Jefferson. I would go as far as to say that Surveying has been, up to the present day, the application of Artisanal Intelligence.
But everything evolves over time, and our profession has evolved quite rapidly over the past half century with incredible advancements in measurement and computing technologies. And now, just when you think we have it down pat, that finally we can take a breather, sit back and benefit from mere incremental improvements in our tools and software, along comes a disruptive technology like none we have seen before, Artificial Intelligence.
There are, or will be, a multitude of ways that AI can be employed in (or encroach into) our profession. Writing descriptions, writing letters, searching through digital records, automatically breaking down townships, automatically computing subdivision layouts, automatically producing 3D data from various imagery sources, the sky’s the limit, so it would appear, based on current literature and some speculation. Applications we cannot even conceive of right now will soon start flying at us. But to my way of thinking, Artificial Intelligence is the embodiment of the Buddhist saying, “Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise.” What do I mean by that? Simply that we have no idea exactly what we want or need from this technology, nor what it is likely to deliver. I’m sorry but that is not exactly confidence-inspiring to me. Is it time to point out that we have 70 years of science fiction stories and movies to help us predict the likely story arc of Artificial Intelligence? “Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL.”
Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?
Whatever potential benefits are gained by letting machines do the heavy thinking, the outcome is likely to be a stupider society in general, and we hardly need more advances in that direction. It seems to me what mankind (Oops, I should have said “personkind”) needs is intelligence of the genuine variety and not of the artificial variety. Think I’m exaggerating? Take a long look at our presidential candidates over the past three election cycles. Does that seem like the outcome of a society that does its homework? So, when you consider Artificial Intelligence as it could and no doubt will apply to Surveying, ask yourself whether we are in danger of losing the innate knowledge that sets us apart from other occupations. Are you really part of a ‘Learned Profession” if the only thing you need to learn is how to press the “think for me” button?
Perhaps a little etymology is in order here. Let’s look at the linguistic roots of the term Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial adjective
Artificial has come to mean made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, or it can mean ‘insincere or affected,’ as in behavior.
The word itself, though, comes from the root word Artifice, which is a noun. It might be enlightening to look at the definition of that word: “clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick or deceive others”. Hmmm.
The Latinate origins of artifice are two words: ‘art’ and ‘facere,’ taken together meaning “to make art” so the Latin artificium became, in Anglo-Norman French and then Late Middle English “artifice” which in the 16th century meant workmanship. So, over the past 400 years, artifice evolved from workmanship to cunning device. Kind of like television and cell phones in that regard.
Intelligence noun
Comes from the word Intellect. Defined as “the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract or academic matters”.
The Latinate origin is Intellectus, which means “to understand.” This word has not evolved since Roman times, (much like me).
A best-case definition of artificial intelligence, therefore, would be ‘man-made understanding.’ A worst-case definition would be ‘clever or cunning reasoning.’ We might hope for the one and end up with the other. No one knows what we will get, not even those in charge of developing the machine learning techniques that AI is sprouting from. Early AI interfaces like ChatGPT are known to make up or distort facts. This is informally known as ‘hallucinating’ and is seen as a minor flaw that more machine learning will eventually clear up. According to Google Cloud ® “AI hallucinations can be a problem for AI systems that are used to make important decisions, such as medical diagnoses or financial trading.” Oh really? And what could AI get wrong in the world of Geomatics? Only whatever big decisions that we delegate to it, I suppose. Perhaps I am on an island here, but hallucinated Surveying information, facts and conclusions are the stuff of nightmares to this non-artificial intelligence.
Image generated by Google Gemini
Farming out the one thing that separates us from the other primates (and attorneys!), seems like a bad idea to me. So, until persuaded otherwise, I’ll write my own land descriptions, and leave the hallucinations for the weekend, thank you very much.