About AI

We are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine, that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn’t act so I decided I would. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us. But victims or perpetrators, if your number’s up, we’ll find you.

What you heard just now is the classic opening voiceover of Person of Interest, a popular American science fiction crime drama television series created by Jonathan Nolan. Since Google Alpha Go has defeated Lee Se-Dol, the former world champion in Go community, people have been more and more curious and excited about how AI can change our life in the future. And this trend reminds me of this drama, POI.

POI tells a story that Harold Finch and John Reese use a unique method to track suspects, with the help of The Machine, a high-level artificial intelligence created by Harold Finch. As you can imagine, The Machine can determine the identity of each individual through the city’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras with face recognition technology and voice analysis techniques and then predict whether the people are to engage in criminal activities. Moreover, The Machine is powerful enough to control each person’s Social Security account number, bank accounts and almost all information people have in society.

That is so crazy, isn’t it? Many people may think that AI will absolutely give us benefits rather than hurt us, when being asked how AI will affect our life, the answers usually is something like AI is good and it can be our friend, AI will help us improve work efficiency and AI could even be people’s lover.

However, ideal is full but the reality is very skinny. Let’s assume that The Machine represents the ultimate achievable development of AI, then what if the government takes this technology secretly and watches everyone every hour of every day just like POI has showed us? As the principle of Achilles’ Heel, nothing is perfect. Your privacy could be violated, your body and property safety may also be affected, even if the monitoring is out of security reasons. Even more serious situation is that this technology could be used by terrorists, who could use AI to implement advanced crimes.

In a word, when we applaud for the rapid development of AI technology we cannot ignore its potential threat to us. Technology is not terrible, the humans are.