Does Artificial Intelligence Beat Natural Stupidity?

By Gordon Hopkins As a man who enjoys saying “Toldja so” and does so on a pretty regular basis, I have to admit, I never saw this coming.AI (artificial intelligence) is becoming ubiquitous. It is the hot new technology. More importantly, it is the hot new buzzword that makes every investor want to throw their money at it. That is why AI is showing up in places that it seems to have no business. The marketing guys know you gotta slap those miracle letters, “A” and “I,” on a product or business if you want investors to drench you in a money waterfall.*That's not the part I didn't see coming. Indeed, I saw that coming from a mile away. See, I’ve lived through it before. In a prior life, I resided in the Bay Area, right in the heart of the dot-com boom. Back then, every knucklehead with a home computer and get-rich-quick aspirations had a dot-com business. Even some of the dumbest ideas made investors drool.Remember Kozmo.com? I do. Bike messengers could be found in zooming all over big cities like New York, Chicago and, of course, San Francisco, delivering important packages. So, the founders of Kozmo set up a website and hired a bunch of those same bike messengers (for a lot more money) to run around town and deliver video games, movies, magazines and munchies, mostly to other dot-com knuckleheads. Delivery was promised within the hour. It was basically Blockbuster using a pizza delivery model.It was ridiculous, of course. It was also ridiculously successful, at least for a while. The business model couldn't actually make money. You can't make any money paying bike messengers to deliver candy bars and Nicholas Cage DVDs to hipsters that couldn't be bothered to make a trip to the video store. But they were flush with cash because it was a dot-com and investors desperately wanted to “get in on the ground floor” of the “next big thing.” I lived through the dot-com boom. I also lived through the dot-com bust, when investors (the ones who still had some money left, anyway) figured out slapping dot-com on it doesn't automatically make it a success.These days, the only thing that remains of Kozmo.com is the Kozmo magnet on my fridge.People are still creating dot-com businesses, of course, but these days investors try and give their money only to those they think might not be really stupid ideas.My guess is, AI will always be with us but, eventually, hopefully, it will someday only be where it will actually be useful. In the meantime, we are still in that “throwing money at anything with AI” stage.That brings me to that thing I never saw coming, although I suppose I should have. A London-based startup called Builder.ai was touted as able to build an app for you without the need for computer coders. The company raised more than $450 million and, at its height, was valued at $1.5 billion.It sounded like a sure-fire, can't-miss investment opportunity. There was just one small hitch.This AI company actually had no AI. At all. Instead of AI, the company used approximately 700 engineers in India to manually write code.Unsurprisingly, Builder.ai is now being sued.Yes, while AI is trying to fool you into thinking they are people, some people are now trying to fool you into thinking they are AI. *Note to investors: Money Waterfall is my new business idea. It will have AI. I'm just not sure how yet. Send me some venture capital and we’ll find out together.

Patricia Kapke

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