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.