Artificial Intelligence and the evolution of Homo Deus
We have seen a lot of science-fiction movies related to Technological Singularity where AI surpasses human intelligence, becomes uncontrollable, and destroys human beings. We accept that as completely fictitious, but to our surprise, there are some real-time AI systems that are targeted towards understanding and manipulating human thoughts and emotions. At the same time, we also have more AI systems that are saving lives, helping humans and businesses with automation.
In this blog post, we’re going to explore various ways AI is impacting the lives of billions both positively and negatively.
Most of the blog's content is inspired by the book “Homo Deus” written by Yuval Noah Harari and “The Social Dilemma”.
Before we deep dive into how AI is impacting our lives, I would like to introduce you to the motivation behind this work,
Motivation
I’m an avid reader of AI, neuroscience, and decision-making. I had earlier written a blog on Human Intelligence vs AI focused on facts about the human brain, complexities involved in processing information, comparing them with AI technologies that's available today, and highlighted the lack of consciousness and emotional intelligence in AI systems, you can find the blog here. There I’ve intentionally not included information about “AI’s impact on our lives even with the lack of consciousness” with a plan of creating a specific article for that.
After watching “The Social Dilemma” I thought this would be the right time to publish this article.
Let’s look at some key points shared by “Yuval Noah Harari” which gives us a better understanding of Human Intelligence.
Intelligence is Decoupling from Consciousness
As we all know, Humans require consciousness coupled with Intelligence to perform tasks like driving cars, playing chess, but the AI systems that are non-consciousness are performing these tasks and are far better than humans.
This raises a series of questions,
- Which of the two is important, intelligence or consciousness?
- If the economy is focused only on intelligence, will humans lose their value?
- If we have AI in our decision-making loop, will it help us or manipulate us?
For now, let’s continue with key points and will go deep into these concerns in the later part of the article.
Organisms are nothing but biochemical algorithms
While liberalism believes in individualism, life-sciences opens up a different perspective. And, challenges the assumptions from liberalism,
- Liberalism: Every human is an individual with an authentic self
Life-science: Humans are assemblage of many biochemical algorithms
- Liberalism: Authentic-self of an individual is free to make decisions on their own
Life-science: Humans comprising of biochemical algorithms is not free, they’re shaped by their genes and environmental pressure
- Liberalism: Only I have access to myself and I know myself best
Life-sciences: External algorithms that monitor us can have better understanding of ourselves. Facebook survey on users interests proved that FB knows user’s interest better than their friends/the user itself.
The first two points are mostly related to the nature of human life but the third is highly co-related to our topic because we’re now giving computer-algorithms access to our personal information which makes them understand us better thereby helping us to improve in this digital economy.
But wait !!! this also means we’ve given AI a chance to manipulate our thoughts and actions as we’ve seen AI has already surpassed human intelligence in specific tasks and getting better and better, growing stronger and stronger every passing day.
Will this lead to techno-humanism where humans are still relevant or data-ism where algorithms are prioritized over humans?
Before we try to think and answer the above question, let’s look at the current scenarios on how AI is impacting our lives,
Even now, AI impacts billions of lives
There are companies that advance on the use of AI and are focused on data collection, predictive modeling, and getting quantitative feedbacks from users. These companies are called as AI-first companies. Companies include but not limited to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon …
Companies that own most of the user’s data and having better prediction models will dominate the industry and win the digital economy.
Instead of focusing on these Companies or their business models, let’s dive into how these AI-First companies are collecting user data and impacting user's lives and actions.
Saving Lives
Here are some example use cases of AI where it's being used to provide life-saving solutions,
- By giving Google, Apple, and other players access to your pre-medical history, and integrating real-time health monitoring devices, algorithms will track your health and help you with your lifestyle, diet, and alert your abnormalities.
- Google search engine can detect an epidemic by identifying spikes in searches related to flu and other symptoms along with demographic information.
- Using your gene, algorithms can predict possible diseases your gene can bring. This knowledge will help you with your lifestyle and will help extend your life span.
- Neuralink is developing brain-machine interfaces that can be implanted inside the skull which has the ability to provide visual prosthesis, eliminate pain, anxiety, fear, and depression.
Knows you better
We assume that we only know about our inner-self and hence have ideologies about individualism and freedom to make decisions on our own. But, we’ve forgotten to observe and to acknowledge that we’re sharing our data to algorithms that are trained to know us better and they’re getting improved each passing day,
- We use kindle to read books as it makes the job easier, while we read and forget most of the content, kindle will record each and every information on your reaction to a particular part of the line/page/chapter. Amazon will remember this information forever and over the period they will know more about your interests in books, specific content/sentiment.
- With access to your personal messages, files these companies know more about you than your friends or even yourself. Similarly, they have complete information about your friends, neighbors, and family member. They can predict who’ll likely be your best-friend, life-partner before you could even sense. For example: if Logan and Emma are best friends, google having access to both of their personal information like interests, contacts, conversations it knows whether they’re likely to be in a relationship or not and even predict whether their relationship will last nor not.
Makes life easier
With advancements in AI, we have systems/solutions that make our day-to-day life easier,
- Virtual assistants: Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are enabling the power of AI to end-users, helping them with voice search, personalized information, automating tasks by integrating with other applications/services
- Personalized content creation, recommendation, and optimized search
- Traffic control using connected car technologies, carpooling solutions
Ethically stealing your attention
We have a very limited amount of attention but there are a number of companies competing to grab and steal our attention in order to profit their business.
- Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Youtube, and similar companies are targeting users with advanced analytics, and design to ethically steal our attention
- They want users to spend more time on their platform so that they can profit through advertising
If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product
Stealing and selling your information
Most tech giants have faced a number of privacy concerns and this is not something directly related to AI but these companies are stealing relevant information to feed their analytics engines to improve recommendations to steal user attention and generate more profit from advertising.
Facebook is so popular for its criticisms on privacy issues: The most famous Cambridge Analytica data scandal, tracking health data from Facebook integrated apps without user consent, transcribing user audio.
Their intention is not to steal your data but to keep you engaged on their platform, and to profit from user-targeted advertisements.
Manipulating users
These companies are targeting users based on user’s interest with their algorithms,
- Instead of providing the right information, they’re pushing information that is relevant to the user. Example: Google search suggestion varies from person to person
- They’re allowing fake news to spread and recommending users of conspiracy theories they’re interested to keep them engaged
- Political manipulation
AI is already part of our day-to-day life and impacting us both positively and negatively. This may be the beginning of the evolution of Homo Deus and Data-ism where Algorithms are prioritized over humans.
But there have been a lot of concerns raised on the downsides of AI, related to bias, and to have proper regulations for capturing and using user’s data. With more and more regulations and fairness test, we’ll have AI systems that will only impact our lives positively.
Check out my other articles on AI,
Happy Learning !!!
