How AI Can Help Us
Technology has made life more comfortable and convenient for us humans. And AI can contribute to this comfort and convenience and help us to benefit our societies. As aforementioned, AI can help doctors diagnose patients. In fact, in his TED talk, Tom Gruber describes how when a pathologist and AI work together, the accuracy for diagnosing cancer goes up to 99.5%. Gruber further explains how AI can enhance life for humans in his TED talk (see below):
Kai-Fu Lee further emphasizes the positive impact that AI can have in his TED talk, entitled, "How AI can save our humanity." Lee argues that AI make our society more efficient, and more importantly, more compassionate. I thought an especially interesting point that he brings out is that "the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist," and this yields to "workaholic thinking" (Lee). However, Lee argues that AI can free us up from this type of work and help us to have more time for compassionate and creative jobs. In effect, AI has the capability to help humans to be more human.
How AI Can Hurt Us
However, I wouldn't be a realist if I didn't examine the flip side of this. The possibility that left unchecked, AI can hurt society more than it can help it.
One of my favorite subjects is history. Last year, we studied the fall of the USSR, and one reason why totalitarian regimes, like the USSR, fail is their incapacity to process all the information that they centralize. However, this incapacity is a human incapacity. So what if AI was to process all the centralized information instead of humans. It would certainly be more efficient. This yields to the possibility of dictatorships (on both ends of the political spectrum) becoming more efficient than democracy in practice, and not just in theory. Yuval Noah Harrari elaborates on this in his TED talk:
In an article published on the MIT Technology Review, Christina Larson asserts that democracy is based on dialogue. That's how governments can find out what's going on with the people and make policies according to that information. But with AI, Larson reasons, governments could cease the dialogue and use data instead. AI would process the vasts amounts of data and suggest or even make decisions based on the data. This development would be favorable for communist societies like China. And indeed, the Chinese government has "several initiatives that share a common strategy of harvesting data about people and companies to inform decision-making and create systems of incentives and punishments to influence behavior" (Larson).
This sounds awfully like the dystopian societies that we read about in English class, which is kind of creepy. But it's also very interesting. Let's say AI does make governments more efficient at the expense of personal freedom. How much liberty would you be willing to sacrifice for a more efficient society? With the rise of AI, this will no doubt be an ongoing debate.
Yet, we have seen that AI doesn't have to take away personal freedoms to help society. So as we move forward a civilization, we must continue to be informed about advances in AI and be careful to as to how we will use it.
Inspiration from the TED talks included above and Christina Larson's article "Who needs democracy when you have data?"
This sounds awfully like the dystopian societies that we read about in English class, which is kind of creepy. But it's also very interesting. Let's say AI does make governments more efficient at the expense of personal freedom. How much liberty would you be willing to sacrifice for a more efficient society? With the rise of AI, this will no doubt be an ongoing debate.
Yet, we have seen that AI doesn't have to take away personal freedoms to help society. So as we move forward a civilization, we must continue to be informed about advances in AI and be careful to as to how we will use it.
Inspiration from the TED talks included above and Christina Larson's article "Who needs democracy when you have data?"
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