Alexandra Reiner
March 2018
Blog Post 4
In my opinion, artificial intelligence can be both beneficial and detrimental. This is illustrated by the arguments stemming from two articles, “To Siri, With Love” by Judith Newman, and “Silicon Valley is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear” by Ted Chiang. Artificial intelligence is used by the public mainly as a “virtual assistant”(Newman), helping us with mundane everyday tasks such as looking up information or finding directions. However, in the Newman article, a young autistic boy’s relationship with the artificially intelligent assistant Siri proves to be more like a friendship. I already saw Siri as beneficial to society in her ability to act as an animated thesaurus of sorts. However, Siri made an especially positive impact on this boy, Gus’, life as someone who struggles relating to and connecting with other people in a traditional way. Not only does she serve as an outlet to his seemingly never ending interest in weather and trains, she also serves as a non judgmental teacher, improving his socialization skills bit by bit. With this personal anecdote, Newman counters the “…commonly held wisdom that technology isolates us” (Newman). Hopefully in the future Siri can further help more people like Gus, by being a friend.
However the intention of assistance, no matter how beneficial these intentions might be, could end up harming humanity in the long run. Chaing’s article uses the well known doomsday belief to frame his argument, discussing that this viewpoint is more pressing than ever. For example, the Chiang article discusses Elon Musk’s analogy to an AI picking strawberries. Perhaps to maximize its strawberry picking skills, the AI decides to destroy us and turn the world into a giant strawberry patch. Although only trying to perform the task to the best of its ability, the AI actually “…[brought] about the end of humanity purely as an unintended side effect”(Chaing). This connects to Newman’s use of the film “Her”, where a lonely man actually falls in love with his IOS assistant. This disconcerting consequence to using AIs as companions could definitely occur in the future, no matter how good intentions might be.
