Final Post

Evolution and its Technology

When they created Futurama for the World Fair in 1964, they imagined all sorts of technological advances. They correctly imagined rovers on the moon, we now have them on Mars. They imagined deepwater exploration, however, they thought it would be manned rather than remote operated. They imagined us living and working in polar regions and using lasers to effortlessly create roads through the jungles, thankfully those two things have not yet happened. One thing they may have never imagined was having the world in our pockets. With smartphones, we have a phone, a camera, the news, the internet, access to shopping, restaurants, and friends who live across the country or across the globe, all at our fingertips. These days it is not uncommon to see people walking around with their faces in their phones, people sleep with them, eat with them and even use them while driving, which leads to the question, is this a healthy relationship with technology? For me, and others in my generation specifically, it is a complicated question. Technology both enriches our lives and robs us of aspects of life. This type of technology is one of the most major innovations of our time and has had a huge impact on society, and we have a love-hate relationship with it because it is something that we have to have, it is no longer a choice. We love to use it to connect with one another and stay in touch over time and space. It is so much fun to be able to shop when we want to or order food anywhere we are. At the same time, we have to be so careful with it because, as we have learned, our privacy is at risk every time we log on. It also gives us no place to hide. We can find people online via their social media or even Google and learn details about them they may not have wanted to share. People can reach us anywhere, anytime and this is, in a way, another invasion of privacy.

Fortunately, my online footprint is clean. I am careful about what I post and I try to maintain a good image because I know that my parents and grandparents follow me on social media and I know that when I want to find a job one day, they will be looking online at my past and present to determine if I will be a good fit for their team. For some people, one simple mistake, if captured and put online, could ruin their lives forever. In the past, young people didn't have to worry that a night out with friends could be the end of their career prospects, but our generation definitely has to be aware of this.

Technology can definitely make us smarter, if we are looking to gain knowledge from it, but it seems that many just want to commiserate, and therefore are more susceptible to misinformation and inadvertently spreading this misinformation to others. Now that we have advanced photo editing software, people can create false images and those can spread online and easily be taken for the truth because people tend to believe what they see. There are so many good things about technology, from helping to cure diseases, to keeping us in touch with people, but it is also a vehicle for misinformation and disinformation whether on purpose or just by chance, a person’s life can be made better or completely destroyed just by technology. While I am happy that technology advanced when it did, and I still had a time period in my life where technology wasn’t the center of everything, our generation basically grew up alongside technology rather than into it like the children of today are. We, as a society, need to make sure that technology is enriching our lives and not taking them over. This will be a huge challenge for all of us going forward, it seems like it is up to each of us as individuals to make sure that we take time away from tech and just get outside and live a little. In the words of one of my favorite professors, Dr. Toole, “When you are eating and you are on your phone, you are not embracing the taste and texture of your food” and the same applies to life. We need to be in the present and live the physical life we have, using technology to enhance it not as an escape from it.

Blog Post #10 Age of AI

 

In the Age of AI

“AI is like electricity, in that eventually everyone will use it.”

The Frontline documentary In the Age of AI was both enlightening and frightening. One of the first things the filmmakers said was that “AI will take jobs,” and this was followed by, “AI is corporate surveillance.” Both of these ideas are something we are aware of in theory, but to have it presented like that and from a documentary that is already five years old was shocking. It makes one wonder how much closer we are to that reality now that five years have already passed. It seems like AI is still brand new, and people are reveling in the excitement of all the magical things it can do, like help us write papers, synthesize and analyze information, create characters from our descriptions, and even create stories from a few prompts. What is discussed less often, especially among people in our age group (Gen Z), are the dangerous things it can do, like take away our privacy, take away our jobs, and even put us at risk from our own government and those of other countries.

In the beginning, AI was used to see if computers could behave more like human brains, learning and adapting rather than just performing the tasks they were taught the way they were taught them. When DeepMinds, a subsidiary of Google, created AlphaGO, a program that could learn to play and win the 4000 year old Chinese game GO, they may not have realized that it would open the door to a competition between East and West for the most technologically advanced, or maybe they did…just 8 years later China is using AI for everything from granting loans to tracking ethnic groups through facial recognition software. While here in the US, the focus was on self driving vehicles, especially trucks for shipping goods. This sounds great, but it is estimated that 300,000 trucking jobs will be threatened in the very near future. It is not only blue collar jobs that are at stake, in fact, according to the documentary, of the 50% of jobs threatened by AI in the next 15 years, a large percentage of these are white collar jobs, particularly in customer service and analytics. One of the points the filmmakers made that resonated is that every company is trying to use AI for more efficiency and because of that, the US is no longer the land of opportunity; AI is the driver for increased inequality.

I think one of the most frightening parts of the documentary was the section on surveillance capitalists. The idea that computers are simply trying to serve us is something most people have bought into, until now. Companies are using computers to analyze each of us through our behaviors online and even at home when we speak to our Alexa. This advancement, like many others in the past, seems like progress, but as the filmmakers point out, all of our advancements have started this way, industrial capitalism claimed nature to be sold and repurposed to make companies money, surveillance capitalism claims human experience to be sold and repurposed to make companies money. Another consequential quote from the documentary sums this up well, “Technology has a place in our lives that it did not earn” and we trusted it.

Finally, the saddest and most disturbing part of the documentary was the section on the surveillance state. Here we learned that the Chinese government is using facial recognition to build national databases for incentives/punishment systems which allow them to detain Muslims for punishment or reeducation. They are monitoring what language people are speaking and even how often and when they pray and they are using the technology for collective punishment of an ethnic group; to make it worse, China sells this technology to other countries who also want to target individual populations. These systems reward party loyalty and punish those who speak out – this is against our US constitution as it currently is, but that doesn’t mean it will be that way forever, our constitution has been adjusted before and certainly will be again.

AI has its good and bad sides and it is mostly reliant on who is operating the systems. Ultimately, AI could help us discover what it means to be human but that all depends on if it is used for good or evil. If countries use it safely without encroaching on rights and privacy, it could eventually be great, but if history tells us anything, it is that countries will likely choose money over people and that is a terrifying thought.