I'm a painter, among other things. So I find myself thinking of the following scenario.
What if I had a smart pallet that knew what color I was going to choose next, and would mix just that amount of color right before I needed it? I'm afraid that the result would be not that I'd appreciate the help, but that I'd suffer from a creeping feeling that I was not the originator of the painting, but merely some kind of servant of some other painter entity who had the idea I was simply carrying out.
The assumption of AI development is that humans want help with everything and that an automated world is a better world. We tend to think of AI in very simplistic terms, like it's all about making our chores easy. It's unfortunate that something as central to humanity's future as the development of AI lends itself so easily to wide misunderstanding. A person really has to spend time studying and thinking about the issues to begin to understand what's truly at stake. I've been doing so for years and even now I keep encountering new and troubling questions.
While some might appreciate automated decision-making, I wonder if the coming of AI will serve to make human life increasingly meaningless. If there's one thing we of the consumerist culture have learned, it's that marketers are masters at instilling in us desires for things we don't need (which incidentally happens to be what they're selling). What they're not good at is asking us what would make our lives more meaningful! And when it comes to marketing AI that could be deadly, producing a world of valueless citizens for whom life would be increasingly empty.
This represents the kind of thing that troubles me about the coming AI tsunami: not so much the overt affect of AI infusing our lives, but the subtle implications of what that will do to the qualities of lived human life that no one is paid to examine but that we'll all be subject to!
The future of all of humanity is on the line, so we should all be in on the conversation about what it is we want of the future. That's why I've helped put together such a public discussion this week, called Vulnerable Humans, Predictable Machines, the third of three symposia, and written a play showing this week about it. I don't want to wake up one day to a world where our future has been finally determined by corporations. Now is the time to speak up if you agree.
The assumption of AI development is that humans want help with everything and that an automated world is a better world. We tend to think of AI in very simplistic terms, like it's all about making our chores easy. It's unfortunate that something as central to humanity's future as the development of AI lends itself so easily to wide misunderstanding. A person really has to spend time studying and thinking about the issues to begin to understand what's truly at stake. I've been doing so for years and even now I keep encountering new and troubling questions.
While some might appreciate automated decision-making, I wonder if the coming of AI will serve to make human life increasingly meaningless. If there's one thing we of the consumerist culture have learned, it's that marketers are masters at instilling in us desires for things we don't need (which incidentally happens to be what they're selling). What they're not good at is asking us what would make our lives more meaningful! And when it comes to marketing AI that could be deadly, producing a world of valueless citizens for whom life would be increasingly empty.
This represents the kind of thing that troubles me about the coming AI tsunami: not so much the overt affect of AI infusing our lives, but the subtle implications of what that will do to the qualities of lived human life that no one is paid to examine but that we'll all be subject to!
The future of all of humanity is on the line, so we should all be in on the conversation about what it is we want of the future. That's why I've helped put together such a public discussion this week, called Vulnerable Humans, Predictable Machines, the third of three symposia, and written a play showing this week about it. I don't want to wake up one day to a world where our future has been finally determined by corporations. Now is the time to speak up if you agree.
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