Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This current trend in AI fails miserably when confronting the nemesis of all logic—the American teenager.

I recently read about a big fast food chain in America that installed one of these AI chattering bots on the drive through ordering system. Let AI take the orders. Save cost. Improve profit. This will work. This is rational business practice.

Along comes the American teenager.

“I’ll have two of this and two of that … (good so far) and 1,000 cups of water and 2,000 packets of ketchup.”

Now that is FUNNY! At least some American teenagers consider it funny as panic ensues inside the kitchen when the human workers attempt to fill the order or something.

The current trend in AI falls back to supervised learning in one form or another. At one time in AI, the trend was what we know call symbolic AI. An AI practitioner would describe the world as a set of laws or rules.

Or course the old way had its problems. And, by the way, the new trend has its problems, too. The obvious answer, which doesn’t seem to be obvious to many in business, is to combine the strengths of these two and many other approaches. One approach does not work in all cases.

And if you are running a fast food business, the American teenager is one of the cases.

I can cite many other cases where the American teenager foiled the best efforts of adults. I won’t do that as some teenagers will read this and it will trigger more “fun.”