The discussion around Artificial Intelligence (AI) can sound a lot
like Brexit. It’s coming but we don’t know when. It could destroy
jobs but it could create more. There are even questions about
sovereignty, democracy and taking back control.
Yet even the prospect of a post-Brexit Britain led by Boris “fuck
business” Johnson doesn’t conjure the same level of collective
anxiety as humanity’s precarious future in the face of
super-intelligent AI. Opinions are divided as to whether this
technological revolution will lead us on a new path to prosperity or
a dark road to human obsolescence. One thing is clear, we are about
to embark on a new age of rapid change the like of which has never
been experienced before in human history.
From cancer to climate change the promise of AI is to uncover
solutions to our overwhelmingly complex problems. In healthcare, its
use is already speeding up disease diagnoses, improving accuracy,
reducing costs and freeing up the valuable time of doctors.
In mobility, the age of autonomous vehicles is upon us. Despite
two high-profile incidents from Uber and Tesla causing death to
pedestrians in 2017, companies and investors are confident that
self-driving cars will replace human-operated vehicles as early as
2020. By removing human error from the road AI evangelists claim the
world’s one million annual road deaths will be dramatically reduced
while simultaneously eliminating city scourges like congestion and
air pollution.
AI is also transforming energy. Google’s DeepMind is in talks
with the U.K. National Grid to cut the country’s energy bill by 10%
using predictive machine learning to analyze demand patterns and
maximize the use of renewables in the system.
In the coming decades autonomous Ubers, AI doctors and smart
energy systems could radically improve our quality of life, free us
from monotonous tasks and speed up our access to vital services.
But haven’t we heard this story of technological liberation
before? From Facebook to the gig economy we were sold a story of
short-term empowerment neglecting the potential for long-term
exploitation.
In 2011 many were claiming that Twitter and Facebook had helped
foment the Arab Spring and were eagerly applauding a new era of
non-hierarchical connectivity that would empower ordinary citizens as
never before. But fast forward seven years and those dreams seem to
have morphed into a dystopian nightmare.
It’s been well documented that the deployment of powerful AI
algorithms has had devastating and far-reaching consequences on
democratic politics. Personalization and the collection of data are
not employed to enhance user experience but to addict and profit from
our manipulation by third parties.
Mustafa Suleyman co-founder of DeepMind has warned that just like
other industries, AI suffers from a dangerous asymmetry between
market-based incentives and wider societal goals. The standard
measures of business achievement, from fundraising valuations to
active users, do not capture the social responsibility that comes
with trying to change the world for the better.
One eerie example is Google’s recently launched AI assistant
under the marketing campaign “Make Google do it”. The AI will now
do tasks for you such as reading, planning, remembering, and typing.
After already ceding concentration, focus and emotional control to
algorithms, it seems the next step is for us to relinquish more
fundamental cognitive skills.
This follows an increasing trend of companies nudging us to give
up our personal autonomy and trust algorithms over our own intuition.
It’s moved from a question of privacy invasion to trying to erode
control and trust in our minds. From dating apps like Tinder to
Google’s new assistant the underlying message is always that our
brains are too slow, too biased, too unintelligent. If we want to be
successful in our love, work or social life we need to upgrade our
outdated biological feelings to modern, digital algorithms.
Yet once we begin to trust these digital systems to make our life
choices we will become dependent upon them. The recent
Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal of data misuse to influence the
U.S election and Brexit referendum gives us a glimpse into the
consequences of unleashing new and powerful technology before it has
been publicly, legally and ethically understood.
We are still in the dark as to how powerful these technologies are
at influencing our behavior. Facebook has publicly stated that they
have the power to increase voter turnout. A logical corollary is
therefore that Facebook can decide to suppress voter turnout. It is
scandalous just how beholden we are to a powerful private company
with no safeguards to protect democracy from manipulative technology
before it is rolled out on the market.
A recent poll from the RSA reveals just how oblivious the public
is to the increasing use of AI in society. It found only 32% of
people are aware that
Artificial
Intelligence is being used in a decision making context, dropping
to 9% awareness of automated decision making in the criminal justice
system. Without public knowledge, there is no public debate and no
public debate means no demand for public representatives to ensure
ethical conduct and accountability.
As more powerful AI is rolled out across the world it is
imperative that AI safety and ethics is elevated to the forefront of
political discourse. If AI’s development and discussion continue to
take place in the shadows of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen and the
public feel they are losing control over their society, then we can
expect in a similar vein to Brexit and Trump a political backlash
against the technological “elites”.
Long-Term Risks
Yet the long-term risks of AI will transcend politics and
economics. Today’s AI is known as narrow AI as it is capable of
achieving specific narrow goals such as driving a car or playing a
computer game. The long-term goal of most companies is to create
general AI (AGI). Narrow AI may outperform us in specific tasks but
general artificial intelligence would be able to outperform us in
nearly every cognitive task.
One of the fundamental risks of AGI is that it will have the
capacity to continue to improve itself independently along the
spectrum of intelligence and advance beyond human control. If this
were to occur and super-intelligent AI developed a goal that
misaligned with our own it could spell the end for humanity. An
analogy popularized by cosmologist and leading AI expert Max Tegmark
is that of the relationship between humans and ants. Humans don’t
hate ants but if put in charge of a hydroelectric green energy
project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad
for the ants.
Humanity’s destruction of the natural world is not rooted in
malice but indifference to harming inferior intelligent beings as we
set out to achieve our complex goals. In a similar scenario if AI was
to develop a goal which differed to humanity’s we would likely end
up like the ants.
In analyzing the current conditions of our world it is clear the
risks of artificial intelligence outweigh the benefits. Based on the
political and corporate incentives of the twenty-first century it is
more likely advances in AI will benefit a small class of people
rather than the general population. It is more likely the speed of
automation will outpace preparations for a life without work. And it
is more likely that the race to build artificial general intelligence
will overtake the race to debate why we are developing the technology
at all.
Read Original article here
https://theconversation-room.com/2018/08/28/do-the-benefits-of-artificial-intelligence-outweigh-the-risks/
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