Spend a vision with me: January 2022

The most important thing the metal ox could have done to benefit humanity is to deflate the AI hot air balloon. If, as we prepare to welcome the water tiger people still believe in the omnipotence of AI, then we probably deserve getting replaced by AI.

AI failed in Covid-19

Covid-19 is probably one of the worse crises of recent memory, as of date, 5.6million people have died, almost 350m infected to date. (1). I think that, since many people believe AI is capable of solving most of our problems, be it AI is the answer to everything, from guiding the doctor’s diagnosis (general practitioner (2) or specialist (3)) and hand (4), to helping predict criminals (5), to more mundane things such as predicting what you will buy next and calculating the spending of your bricks and mortar spending (6).

But, don’t you realise something? The biggest challenge we have faced the last 2 years has been Covid19. Has AI helped solve anything?

No,

AI failed at predicting the course of the disease (7)
AI has failed at predicting the best approach to slowing the spread of the disease

So far, a virus has been beating the finest AI minds (or at least those who have been trying to solve the problem, or those who really think they could).

Does that mean that AI is useless? May be Covid-19 is just too big a problem for AI.

AI failed in OCBC Bank Scams

OCBC customers lost SGD8.5m in December 2021 (8). The banking world is one where AI is used aggressively.

Not only that, OCBC has magnanimously decided to re-imburse all the people affected (9), do note however that the affected people have to sign NDAs (10). Not only that, both OCBC and DBS are imposing measures to minimise the impact of such events (11).

What does that have to do with AI, you may ask?

Afterall, the CEO of OCBC, in yesterday’s Sunday Times details how 100 people were working 24/7 over the whole month of December to fight the war against the scammers. May I ask, the value of the effort of these people; SGD8.5m was ‘lost’ how much was saved?

But the real question is, with so much AI in the banking sector (12)(13)(14), even advising you how to use your money, why can’t AI have stopped these fraudulent transactions; especially since, in the case of 8.5m in OCBC the fraud took place over a whole month…

But these are to take your money and invest it…

How about protecting your money?

Well, AI is full at work there too! Predicting what fraudsters will do next (15), getting academic papers written about their success (16) and even recovering the funds in 30 minutes (17).

Is all this smoke and mirrors?

What is MAS doing about this? MAS is at the bleeding edge of AI, having global challenges (18), encouraging banks to control use of ML (19), coming up with pretty papers to control use of AI (20).

But, how about making sure AI is applied properly and actually protects customers of the banks?

Of course, you can argue that SGD8.5 million is medium-sized peanuts (less than average CEO’s salary (21) in covid hit 2020), but I would like to know how this fraud managed to get past the anti-fraud AI, and still continue to do so for a whole month. Also, while the country is watching OCBC, how about the other banks? Or is it a weakness in OCBC’s systems that has been exploited?

If it is the latter, what has MAS been doing? Fines and all that are just closing the barn door after the 8.5m stallion bolted.

Even more interesting is the laissez-faire approach by MAS (22) and contrasted with European legal framework where the onus is on the bank, rather than on the customer in such cases.

I really don’t think that it is common for people to suddenly and quickly empty their accounts via money transfers; even rule-based systems would have been able to catch these…

So is AI a failure?

In simple terms no.

Gartner has the AI hype cycle (23), see below:

https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-4-trends-that-prevail-on-the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-ai-2021

Do you notice something interesting?
Most AI technologies are at or on the way to the peak of inflated expectations.

Basically: STOP BELIEVING THE ‘DATA SCIENTISTS’/’AI VENDORS’ AND USE YOUR BRAIN.

Am I exaggerating?

Let me tell you a small story and you decide. I was having this meeting recently, a teams working meeting with customers, all of a sudden a customer got up and did some stretches. She explained her watch told her to do so. I laughed and told her her machine has trained her well.

Just think about this.

A device, that tracks a few parameters is deemed to know more about you than your own personal machine trained over your lifetime (your brain), and with full access to all your sensors (senses, nerves…).

I think it may be ok for individuals to make these decisions, but when professional decision makers do the same, it is time to ask questions about what is really going on.

1 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17419-7#Sec3

3 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759

4 https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/contributed-power-ai-surgery

5 https://mashable.com/article/china-ai-crime-minority-report

6 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/09/do-smart-supermarkets-herald-the-end-of-shopping-as-we-know-it

7 https://www.flasog.org/static/COVID-19/COVID19PredictionPaper20200426.pdf

8 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/ocbc-phishing-sms-scam-do-not-click-bitly-url-link-2407796

9 https://mustsharenews.com/ocbc-scam-payouts/

10 https://mothership.sg/2022/01/ocbc-scam-victims-nda/

11 https://mustsharenews.com/ocbc-dbs-scam-measures/

12 https://www.ocbc.com/personal-banking/investments/roboinvest