So far in class, we've only talked about how A.I. directly relates to humans- how it mimics us, how it communicates with us, how it can be more like us. While it's fun to play with chat bots and stimulating to think about whether or not a machine can truly "think" or "understand", those are just a small part of the picture. Where A.I. actually impacts our lives right now is economically, and we should be concerned.
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| It's interesting to think about whether machines can think, but not exactly important |
The most obvious way that machines are impacting us economically is through automation. As mechanical technology and A.I. improve, almost every job could be automated, and a huge percentage of people would be unemployed. Bear with me for a bit, but that reminds me of Star Trek. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard reveals that his family owns a vineyard and produces wine (because real wine is apparently better than the readily available "synthehol" produced by replicators), even though Federation society is almost entirely post-scarcity. What we discover is that since labor is not necessary, people do jobs as hobbies. While I don't imagine this is what will actually happen when/if most real-world jobs get automated, it's certainly a reassuring possibility.
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| Captain Picard, pictured with tea. Earl Grey. Hot. |
Other possibilities for what happens when a large percentage of people aren't needed in the workforce are less comforting. Will the remaining people be forced to fend for themselves on the streets or in some sort of pre-automation enclave? Will people with real jobs exploit people whose original jobs got automated, and use them to do degrading things for little to no money? Will we as a society decide that we'd rather have people have jobs, and start to de-automate our world? Will the remaining jobs be carved up into part-time positions so everyone is "employed" but not enough to actually pay the bills? Will the people who lost their jobs to automation revolt against those who didn't? I'd rather live in the Star Trek future.
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| Expect to see more elevator attendants if we decide to de-automate |
Robby only briefly mentions job automation in his article, as his main concern is that A.I. is developed exclusively as a means to make money, without any regard for the impact it has on our society. Think about it...how many A.I. projects can you think of that were primarily motivated by improving the world? Maybe an elder care robot, maybe an arty indie game, but even those might be money-first projects that just appear to be trying to help people. Even if the producers of the project aren't thinking about making money, the people who finance them will be, meaning big projects will never be completely free of a profit motive.
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| Hellblade helped shed light on mental illness, but it also had a nearly $10 million budget |
According to Robby, the fact that A.I. algorithms are produced for monetary reasons leads some of them to be racist. He assumes that in a world where A.I. was produced with one eye on how the project will impact people, that such racist A.I.s won't exist. I'm not entirely convinced, since these are programs produced by people (for now). These people could simply make mistakes, which happens to the best of us, or they could be racists who intentionally make programs do racist things. I don't think it's fair to say that the pursuit of money is inherently going to ignore the needs of people. Ideally, consumers drive producers to make better products (that's how capitalism is supposed to work, anyway) that aren't racist.
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| Nikon cameras had a bug where they thought East-Asian people were blinking |
While it may seem like job-stealing robots and racist camera algorithms aren't terribly related (besides the whole technology thing), they are. They both underlie a trend in technology: we, collectively, are being short sighted. If we don't change, and we only look to the immediate future of what we can get technology to do, we won't know what to do with it once we achieve it. Let's say Nikon figures out automated cameras that take perfect pictures every time. Now what? Well, photographers are out of work, but that's not a huge deal because they can do something else. Until we figure out how to automate that too. Then what? At some point, we'll need to decide what the end-goal is, because otherwise we'll end up at a pretty terrible place.
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