Artificial Intelligence Is Not as Rational as You Think
Or perhaps to put it another way, artificial intelligence is *only* as rational as we think. At this stage of its development, AI is programmed entirely by humans. To the extent that present-day AI "thinks" anything, it only thinks what we tell (or have told) it to think. And what, or how, or why we tell it to think things is influenced by the various biases held by whoever is doing the programming. So while the tech world is still in the formational stages of AI technology, laying foundations that others will build on for generations to come, there's concern about who is doing the programming, and how to separate that work from the inherent biases of the people doing it. Tech writer Mark Feffer discusses the problem in a pair of recent posts to the Insights blog of IT employment facilitator Dice, one published in January and a second published this week. The British Computer Society is also voicing concerns about bias in AI, noting a problematic lack of diversity among teams that are tackling AI projects around the globe.
BCS policy director Bill Mitchell describes the problem is a statement to media: "There is a very old adage in computer science that sums up many of the concerns around AI-enabled public services: �Garbage in, garbage out.' In other words, if you put poor, partial, flawed data into a computer it will mindlessly follow its programming and output poor, partial, flawed computations. AI is a statistical-inference technology that learns by example. This means if we allow AI systems to learn from �garbage' examples, then we will end up with a statistical-inference model that is really good at producing 'garbage' inferences."
Are Computers Still a Thing in IT Workplaces?
A whole lot of people who don't actually work in IT jobs use a computer every day. So it stands to reason that many, if not most people who do IT thing for a living, either at IT companies or in IT-focused roles in non-tech workplaces, probably also use a desktop or laptop computer to do their jobs. Reporting data from their recent Salary Survey, the team at Certification Magazineput some numbers to the question. A CertMag report posted last week reveals that, though we may think of IT jobs as being increasingly reliant on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile or handheld devices, there's still plenty of demand for traditional desktop and laptop computers: more than 80 percent of certified IT professionals who participated in the survey use a desktop or laptop computer to do their jobs for at least seven hours per day.
CompTIA's Cloud+ Credential Gets Federal Thumbs Up
Uncle Sam now wants YOU ... to get CompTIA's Cloud+ cloud computing credential. It's well-known that the U.S. Department of Defense already uses CompTIA credentials as an important hiring baseline for potential government IT job candidates. Now Cloud+ has officially joined the club, standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the widely-referenced DoD 8570 list with the likes of A+, Security+, Network+, and CySA+. It's just another reason to consider putting Cloud+ on your certification to-do list.
CBT Nuggets Endorses Amazon Web Services Certification
Speaking of clout-atious cloud computing certifications, IT training provider CBT Nuggets thinks that you should get an Amazon Web Services certification – before you do anything else in IT. In particular, the braintrust at the CBT Nuggets Blog thinks that anyone planning to work in IT should get the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification. Given that cloud computing is more or less directly involved in nearly every facet of modern IT work, the Nuggets team think that anyone planning to work in IT can create an important career springboard by developing a solid grasp of cloud fundamentals. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is the credential of choice because of Amazon's dominating cloud computing market share. As the only foundation-level cert in the AWS certification portfolio, Certified Cloud Practitioner covers all of the need-to-know basics that apply to AWS in particular, and cloud computing in general.
That's all for this edition of Certification Watch. Please keep your certification news and tips coming to the GoCertify News Editor.
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