AI is the accountant’s friend

Richard Clarke shares his thoughts on the value artificial intelligence can brings to accountancy professionals.

Artificial Intelligence is the topic on everyone’s lips, from business leaders to politicians to the man in the street.

Something you may have missed though is the difference between data centre AI and portable AI. Supercomputers (not home computers) began to reach human-brain levels of computation in the 2010s. Any computer can multiply 678,971 by 657,589 far quicker and more accurately than we can – that’s a specific task. AI is good at those, too.

The brain, though, excels at performing many complex things simultaneously, reasoning through all sorts of tasks on the spot, without help.

Brains are great at dealing with ‘exceptions’. AI currently not so good.

Our brains take inputs from the five senses and extra sensory receptors, like our feeling of acceleration, allowing us to orientate and balance. They have an incredible understanding of our environment, and uses various pre-set routines, while reasoning through all sorts of obstacles and issues that arise.

Power usage and space

The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power (less than an incandescent lightbulb!).

Supercomputers, on the other hand, run at over 20 megawatts, or about a million times as much power.

While the brain fits neatly into your skull, supercomputers need football pitches of space.

So, when AI rivals broad human abilities you need to also understand its energy usage in order to do so.

This is no problem for us, as humans, using AI on our desktop and getting supercomputers to run the programs in the US, for example, but putting all that power into a robot or a car is a magnitude harder. So it’s going to take longer than we estimate before AI is advanced enough to be as efficient as the human brain.

In fact, according to Moore’s Law, which states that energy efficiency doubles every two years, it would take about 20 years for AI to become a thousand times more efficient.

That could be shortened, of course, by making use of wireless connections to data centres, although there are obvious limitations in that process.

So, generally we tend to overestimate the growth and growth rate in physical tech, yet software and electronics will continue to surprise and impress us.

While this is great news for blue collar workers, it’s a bigger disruption for white-collar office workers.

However, fear not, aspiring accountants!

Technological disruption doesn’t always mean less pay or even no human job – you just you become 5x or 10x more productive, individually.
Your job description may well change but you can make full use of the advantages that AI gives us.

My advice is not to fear AI in the workplace, but to embrace it and make it work for you.