Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily life. Are we too dependent on it?

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but trust me, if you rely on your phone to help you navigate, it just might someday.

My wife and I were en route from Raleigh to St. Louis, having enjoyed crossing the Smokies and the Cumberlands and just coming up on Paducah, Kentucky. Having been routed around a massive traffic jam in Knoxville by my phone, I was much pleased with it, and so listened carefully when it described a similar problem ahead in Paducah.

The result: Following my phone’s directions, I pulled off the interstate and began taking a series of roads through Paducah, just as I had done in Knoxville. My phone kept sending me down smaller and smaller roads, and soon we were out in the country, presumably bypassing the massive interstate jam ahead. I saw squirrels and racoons, barns and horses.

The road lost its centerline and got narrower, and the scenery was gorgeous. Also ominous, because after a while I realized I wasn’t hearing anything from my phone at all. Now the road turned to gravel. I pulled off the road and checked out the situation. No signal.

I once gave a talk where I suggested that a major casualty of GPS would be our sense of direction, our ability to read maps and navigate independently. And now here I was, without a clue about my location other than somewhere in rural Kentucky, with no signs to help me. I did have a map in the car, but it didn’t include any of the roads I had been on.

I decided to re-trace the route until I got a signal, and then go straight into Paducah and get back on the blasted interstate from which the phone had pulled me. It worked, and the tie-up was fairly short, but what a lesson. Overall, I lost over an hour wandering in bluegrass country.

People sometimes think in apocalyptic terms of our dependence on technology, and it’s true that something like an EMP – electromagnetic pulse, as from an upper altitude nuclear explosion, or even a solar flare – could cripple electronics. But on a daily basis, all it takes is losing a cell signal, and how often have I done that? So I’m taking artificial intelligence in my gadgets with a grain of salt these days.

Prepare yourself for a lot more of them, though. Google is continuing to throw major resources at artificial intelligence, as are its competitors, and Google Assistant (the voice technology that so disastrously got me lost in Kentucky) is a factor in all the new hardware. Google is producing lots of new gadgets, from Chromebooks to Google Home. The point isn’t making money from hardware, though. It’s about getting us so used to AI that we’ll find it hard to live without it. Until it’s not there, anyway.

With all the big tech players exploring artificial intelligence, it’s clear that the emerging future includes helpful “assistants” in almost every area of our lives. LG has already announced, for example, that its new products will let you control a robo-vacuum from Google Assistant. Everyday gadgets are going to be getting smarter and smarter. Let’s hope we have the smarts to remember how to use them if our delicate network connections go down.

With all of that to think about, it’s fascinating to ponder what Google’s AI-powered AlphaGo has just accomplished. I’ve written about the technology before, back when the software took various champions at the game of Go on and annihilated them. Get this: The new version of AlphaGo, called AlphaGo Zero, didn’t use thousands of Go games to make itself smart, like its predecessor. It acted without human data and simply taught itself how the game works.

AlphaGo Zero beat the original AlphaGo in 100 consecutive games, after training itself for only three days. That’s how fast AI is progressing. The prospects for artificial intelligence are startling and provocative, and they could lead to a lot of good. But I hope we keep in mind how vulnerable our infrastructure is before we commit too many key resources to it.

This story was originally published November 5, 2017 at 6:14 PM with the headline "Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily life. Are we too dependent on it?."