The Machine Race: How Humans Can Keep Up With AI
Accelerating public understanding of artificial intelligence
Smell burning rubber? That’s the smoke cloud left by AI putting its foot to the floor. Artificial intelligence is accelerating hard. In The Machine Race I’ll be trying to keep up to discover how new technologies are impacting society and the different people within it. Come along for the ride, because whoever we are in the human race, we can’t influence what we don’t understand.
The Conversation
SM: Chat GPT, tell me — will artificial intelligence be the pinnacle of human evolution, or are we discovering fire with no extinguisher?
ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal beliefs or predictions. However, it’s widely recognized that AI has the potential to significantly impact society and the world we live in. Whether it will be the pinnacle of human evolution or a fire without an extinguisher will largely depend on how it is developed, governed, and used.
SM: Cheers, GPT!
ChatGPT: You’re welcome!
I’m Suzy Madigan. In The Machine Race series I’ll be investigating developments in AI and its risks and benefits. I’ll be asking questions about safety, ethics, governance, and what artificial intelligence means for the future of the human race. To learn more, I’ll be talking to experts and personalities from different fields, from AI researchers to philosophers, artists to CEOs, musicians to military personnel. Let’s generate a public discussion, and together decode AI for ‘ordinary’ citizens in all our human diversity.
Interconnected: Global affairs, individual experience
As an aid worker, I’ve spent 15 years with communities caught up in conflicts and brought down by poverty and marginalisation. To respond effectively to humanitarian emergencies, and preferably prevent them occurring in the first place, we have to understand the social, political and economic dynamics that lead to them.
Because it isn’t bad luck that makes people poor, wars break out, or certain individuals more vulnerable to disasters than others. Who has the power to make choices, decisions, and be heard determines who gets to benefit, and on what grounds.
So why is an aid worker like me, normally focused on families starving in Somalia or women denied rights in Afghanistan, thinking about artificial intelligence? Isn’t there enough to worry about in the ‘real world’?
Global AI, individual impact
Well, right now, a brave new world is being shaped by AI. Its potential to transform life on earth is huge, from the eradication of disease, to alleviating poverty, to tackling climate change; even making humanitarian action more efficient. Left to its own devices, the human race hasn’t excelled in looking after the planet and the majority of its own species — AI might be the solution.
But, and it is a big ‘but’, if we’re not painstakingly careful about the design and use of AI, it has the potential to tear open the flimsy fabric of society. Every day, we see the effects of intolerance, bias, greed and power struggles in our communities and global systems. If those human frailties are reflected in the way artificial intelligence is built, how it works, where it’s used, what it decides — who gets to benefit — AI won’t improve human life. It will deepen inequality, further fragment communities, and have unintended consequences that can’t be mitigated once they’re out of the box.
How fast do we need to move?
AI is no science fiction of the future — it’s already influencing significant parts of our lives. It’s changing communication, internet search, work, education, health care and medicine, transport, climate science, culture and the arts to name a few. Great benefits are possible. But risks exist in each domain, and beyond.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted the risks unregulated AI poses to democracy. Artificial intelligence, already being deployed on the battlefield (though not necessarily as autonomous weapons — yet), isn’t adequately covered by existing laws of war. Facial recognition raises human rights concerns for privacy, surveillance, racial bias in law enforcement, and its use by repressive regimes.
AI is developing exponentially, fuelled by an AI arms race between countries and big tech companies, yet there are currently no globally agreed rules governing its safe design and use, or to ensure that decisions made by AI are fair, unbiased and inclusive.
Core principles guide the delivery of humanitarian aid: humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence. Key tenets are ‘Do No Harm’ and ‘Leave No One Behind’. The non-profit aid sector, which exists to help people, doesn’t always get it right. Slowly, we’re addressing racism, colonial power dynamics, and enabling communities to shape their own humanitarian responses. We still have far to go.
In for-profit tech firms, many AI researchers are considering similar ethical principles, but we’ve also seen what happens when tech companies embrace a different approach: move fast and break things.
As ChatGPT told me, without responsible development and use, AI “could contribute to the destabilization of society and even to the destruction of humanity.”
The conversation needs to become mainstream — and informed
Increasing numbers of academics, technologists and political representatives are considering the implications of AI, in specific areas and for the future of human civilization. Yet, few ordinary citizens, including myself, fully understand artificial intelligence, and we haven’t got long to catch up. Because a comparative handful of people are busy determining how AI is designed and deployed right now, and the structure of society can’t only be decided in an AI research lab or a boardroom.
If, as Stephen Hawking suggested, AI might be the biggest, but possibly the last event in human history unless we learn how to avoid the risks, let’s make sure we’re not spectators.
Join me on the journey, and let’s open up the conversation.
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