I\u2019ve seen some impressive AI demos across the web where researchers teach an AI to reproduce human faces or lip sync audio over pre-existing videos. Impressive, and unimaginable, several years ago for sure. Similarly unimaginable today is the way in which social networks and other tools have been used to undermine democratic systems through the propagation of misinformation. I fear that these two things have a shared future, where fake news is generated by AI\u2019s is indistinguishable from the real thing.<\/p>\n
One of my first classes in graduate school was artificial intelligence, after the course summary the instructor and the TA\u2019s held a bit of a Q and A session. One of the questions that stuck out to me was along the lines \u201cpeople like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are giving us really big warnings about AI, could their predictions be accurate, should we be worried?\u201d The panel looked at one another for a moment and they gave several answers in so many words saying: \u201cthey\u2019re not in the field and don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about\u201d and concluding \u201cthere is always an off switch.\u201d<\/p>\n
In college there was an article assigned as reading in my introductory CS class, published in Wired magazine in 2000: \u201cWhy the Future Doesn\u2019t Need Us\u201d by Bill Joy. In which, Joy stresses that we could be on the verge of creating the social or existential equivalent of the atomic bomb for the 21st century if scientists (computer and bio-scientists in particular) forego ethics or if standards are relaxed in anyway. I make it a point to reread it every couple of years, it rang true when I first read it in 2009, today that ring is deafening.<\/p>\n
NRA slogans are simple logical blanket statements but they do not directly refute criticisms of gun control. A recent one like \u201cthe only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun\u201d is based on a lot of assumptions like how a good guy can never become a bad guy. Banning guns nationally \u2013as Australia did in 1996\u2013 also stops bad guys with guns. An older one which I don\u2019t see very often anymore is \u201cguns don\u2019t kill people, people kill people.\u201d This is true, guns -inanimate objects- don\u2019t just walk around autonomously going off, but can be more accurately phrased \u201cGuns don\u2019t kill people, people with guns kill people.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think the TA\u2019s of that introductory AI class are largely right in the way that the NRA slogans are right. There is always an off switch, and AI\u2019s do not possess any physical autonomy no matter how much digital autonomy we give them. Yet the larger point is being missed about the dangers of over-developing AI. \u201cAI doesn\u2019t harm people, bad actors using AI harm people.\u201d Social networks don\u2019t spread propaganda, bad actors, AI algorithms\u2013designed to make us click as much as possible\u2013and unsuspecting users on social networks spread propaganda. When it comes to these complex social systems which AI can run on top of the off switch is difficult to find, and the on switch is often tripped without fully recognizing it.<\/p>\n
In another 20 years, will AI be a tool for empowerment, justice, and productivity? Or a tool for suppression, discrimination, and distraction? I therefore believe it\u2019s critically important that AI researchers think critically and ethically about what they are building. It\u2019s no longer a question of what can AI do but of what someone can do with it. In the context of some tool or model, what malicious actions can be performed with using it, how to recognize it, and finally, how to turn it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve seen some impressive AI demos across the web where researchers teach an AI to reproduce human faces or lip sync audio over pre-existing videos. Impressive, and unimaginable, several years ago for sure. Similarly unimaginable today is the way in which social networks and other tools have been used to undermine democratic systems through the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesixsides.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}