

Professor of sociology at University of Bucharest
Whether we’re talking about judicial decision making (e.g., “risk assessment scoring”) or modeling who is at risk for homelessness, algorithmic systems don’t simply cost money to implement. They cost money to maintain. They cost money to audit. They cost money to evolve with the domain that they’re designed to serve. They cost money to train their users to use the data responsibly. Above all, they make visible the brutal pain points and root causes in existing systems that require an increase of services.
Some take comfort in the fact that A.I. is still relatively “dumb,” with the sense that it is not a concern until it becomes smarter than us. But what they’re missing is that this isn’t a race to create a superintelligence — this is a race to replace human skills and build the next “can’t live without it” monopoly. In that race, A.I. doesn’t need to become better than us. We just need to become dumber than it. As smart devices subsume more of our capabilities, we will gain efficiency, but we will lock ourselves into a dependent relationship.