Equity Magazine November 2017

FINANCE
Dennis Whitney, Senior Vice President
of the Institute of Management
Accountants (IMA)
In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg hired one of the
world’s leading deep-learning and
machine-learning scientists, New York
University’s Professor Yann LeCun, to
lead Facebook’s artificial intelligence laboratory.
Facebook, a company that builds its business by
learning about its users and packaging their data
for advertisers, invested in AI with the hope that
it could better understand its users’ line of
thinking by teaching a computer to think.
There are about 1.2 billion people uploading
136,000 photos and updating their status
293,000 times per minute. It’s pretty much
impossible for Facebook to quantify that
volume of data with human employees. That’s
where the social media platform’s Artificial
Intelligence – in the shape of deep-learning –
comes in. Deep-learning allows machines to
learn and classify data by themselves. It’s no
wonder Zuckerberg is constantly championing
Artificial Intelligence and its many benefits.
In July this year, many newspapers and websites
resorted to sensationalism with headlines to the
tune of, “Did we humans just create
Frankenstein?”. Those headlines fed AI
naysayers. The truth is far less appealing.
Researchers at Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence
Research had built a chatbot that was meant to
learn how to negotiate, by mimicking human
trading and bartering. But when the social
network paired two bots, nicknamed Alice and
Bob, to trade against each other, they deviated
from human language and learnt their own form
of communication. Although Facebook’s
bargain-hunting bots aren’t a sign of an imminent
singularity — or anything even approaching that
level of sophistication — they are significant, in
part because they prove once again that an
important realm we once assumed was solely the
domain of humans, language, is definitely a
shared space.
The shock with AI though has always been the
singularity. How long until machines become
smarter than us? How long until they take over?
That line of thinking isn’t simply limited to a few
conspiracy theorists. There’s a growing number
of people, including great minds like Elon Musk,
who believe that a Terminator-style Armageddon
will be upon us soon enough. In fact, the Tesla
and SpaceX founder even described Zuckerberg’s
understanding of the subject as limited. When it
comes to AI, Musk doesn’t mince words. He is
strictly against the idea, dubbed it "the greatest
risk we face as a civilization" and has called for
swift government regulation on the subject. In
September this year, Musk even went so far as to
tweet, “China, Russia, soon all countries w strong
computer science. Competition for AI superiority
at national level most likely cause of WW3 imo.”
When it comes to AI, Dennis Whitney, Senior
Vice President of the Institute of Management
Accountants (IMA), leans more towards
Zuckerberg than Musk. “I personally don’t
believe in a technological singularity,” Whitney
says. “I believe there are boundaries to how far
AI will go. There’ll be a self-imposed limit on our
creation of the robots that would not allow that
to happen.”
A vocal supporter of AI, Whitney believes the
technological advancement is just another tool
that can has the ability to make our lives easier
and more interesting. “There is a risk of people
losing their jobs. People with routine jobs like
auditors and accountants who file tax returns will
suffer,” Whitney says. “It’s just something that
will happen.”
He’s not wrong. Industrial revolution brings
disruption in just about every industry. What
matters is how we tackle that disruption. “I have
the benefit of experience which gives me
hindsight,” Whitney explains. “When I started,
we did accounting on paper and ledgers. If we
made a mistake, we’d have to recalculate
everything. Then, IBN came out with computers
and eventually products like Excel came into the
fold. Interestingly, with more technological
advancements, people kept saying accounting
jobs are going to go away. And some did, but
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EQUITY