“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.
As the doors at the rear of the theatre open, a slow rumble of chitter chatter emerges from the crowd. Although the past two and a bit hours have been filled with vast amounts of silence and a close up on a piercing red dot, the audience can’t help but feel awestruck. 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the first times the broader public was introduced to Artificial Intelligence. Hal, the robotic, helpful and scary red dot became a symbol of the good and the bad that AI can bring. It also became a priming point for most of our understanding of what AI is. A non-sentient being, forged by man with unlimited knowledge and cognition. Able to calculate at the speed of light and communicate its findings back to us. The idea of Hal 50 years ago was far-fetched, today it’s becoming more of a reality. When people think about the risks of AI, they think of Hal, or SkyNet and Terminator. Machines that have become self-aware and realise the power they have over their makers. Yet there is another risk of AI that we overlook. It is a risk that all new technologies are influencing today, and we still blindly create, without pausing to think about the consequences.
To understand the impacts of AI, you must first be able to define it. AI shall be defined as such, “An autonomous and adaptable system”. You see many definitions of AI these days, all painting different pictures of what AI is. The definition presented above allows AI to fall within its broadest range of possibilities. Machine learning and deep learning, neural networks, data science and robotics. All of these fields of computer science encompass AI. If we truly want to understand the risks and the benefits of AI, the progress it can usher in, we must understand all the different pieces that it embraces.
“The light on the modem flashes red, a huff and a puff of a man stomps down the stairs. He was just starting the last season of Stranger Things”.
Calculating the benefits of AI, like any new technology is difficult. The value of new technology is never fully realised until we “can’t live without it”. The internet today is seen as a necessary utility, on par with water and electricity. My roommate Justin would attest to this fact. I’ve never seen him as angry as when the internet cuts out on him. Yet do the benefits of the internet denote progress for humanity? Progress is an interesting idea. Moving forwards to a better state, to an advanced condition, progress is something that we strive for everyday. There have been many technologies before us that have been seen to signal a progression of the human race. Revolutionary technologies such as the light bulb and the steam engine both gave rise to increasing efficiency and productivity in society, two pillars in which AI boasts the largest benefit. You can see it in the AI tech that is touted today. From Google’s upgraded voice assistant that can call and interact with other humans (is that you Hal?) to machine learning algorithms that curate the content we interact with on Netflix, Spotify and Instagram. All of these technological advances are supposed to save us time and effort. Yet is having a call made for you a better state, or an advanced condition? The list of benefits that AI can bring is large and some will progress society immensely - machine learning will allow for a drastic decrease in miss diagnosis, which can account for 6-17% of hospital complications. However, much of what we will get from AI is superficial benefits. The benefits that the general public really care about will on the surface seem to improve our lives, but ultimately will only save us minutes that we are going to waste anyway. Yes there may be superficial benefits that AI creates, but this is not an inherent risk. What makes AI risky is something much different. It’s the same risk that we have just started to see new technology having on natural human progression.
“AI may change what we do and the way we live, but it will also profoundly change who we are”
You’ve just moved into a new suburb. You want to go to the supermarket but you don’t know the way. So you input the destination into Google Maps and off you go. The next day you want to go to the park, you input the destination, and off you go. The day after you want to go to the hairdresser which you remember is vaguely in between the supermarket and the park but you put the destination into Google Maps anyway. One could argue that Google Maps is an unprecedentedly useful technology. However, studies have shown that our spatial orientation is damaged the more we use navigation apps. Those that use navigation apps are found to have less grey matter near their hippocampus (the area of the brain responsible for memory and navigation) than those who don’t. Google Maps is literally shrinking areas of our brain, making it harder for us to orientate ourselves in new environments. Though Google Maps is a transcendent technology, we were unable to anticipate the effects it would have on our brains. It isn’t just navigation apps where these changes in stable human conditioning are being eroded. Social media has connected billions around the world, but it’s also redefining what it means to be “social”. Psychology today states that, “Without positive, durable relationships, both our minds and our bodies fall apart”. Social media has been noted to drive down face to face interactions, and encourage envy within our peer groups. We’re going against our bodies intended design to create meaningful and deep connections with other humans around us, substituting it for fleeting ephemeral connections online. In turn we are witnessing higher rates of loneliness as well as increased cases of anxiety and depression.
Google Maps and social media are both technological staples in modern life, but they’ve started to have negative effects that we never foresaw. This is what is so dangerous about AI. It is a technology that will have many implications that we won’t for-see at this rate. We have not done enough research into how AI will change the way society interacts with itself, how cultures may change, how our brains will change. Risk is defined by potential harm. And AI is a new technology that could have potential to upend our evolutionary processes in the same vein that current technologies are slowly doing.
Today technology is profoundly changing what it means to be human. AI will change society as we know it. It will usher in a new era of economic boom, it will reduce congestion on our roads through driverless cars, it will allow us to better analyse and understand our world and maybe even our universe.. AI will do a lot of good on paper, but it will also further detach us from what it means to be human. Evolution will no longer take its necessary course. Instead humans will be reliant on the technology we’ve created to help us survive. We will forget how to socialise and we’ll forget how to deeply enquire. We’ll lose our patience quickly, and our brains will be forever changed. AI will push society into a different state than where we are today, but you won’t be able to call it an advanced state, you won’t be able to call it progress.
