Redefining the “person,” what is AI?
Well, it seems that I’ve come full-circle. My first blog post focused on HAL, a supercomputer from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, in my final blog posts for WRIT150, I’ll be discussing artificial intelligence (AI) once more, looking at its disruptive capacity.
Artificial intelligence (AI) broadly defined, is a computer program that can “think” on its own and take independent actions based on those “thoughts.”
I put those words in quotation marks because whether a machine can “think” is a philosophical argument. Regardless, in this context, to “think” entails that we perceive it to be making independent thought.
AI has been a tech “buzzword” recently, with every major tech company throwing their hat into the ring, vying customers to incorporate them into their own ecosystem.
There are many different implementations of AI, that can be split into two major categories: interactive AI, and non-interactive AI. Interactive AI is what we most commonly interact with, and includes Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Samsung’s more recent Bixby. You likely have one of these AI on your phone, which you can speak to.
Non-interactive AI work behind the scenes to improve your experience. One of the newest forms of this AI is self-driving car technology. While we do not directly interact with it, as the technology emerges, it could become one of the most important new AI systems in the world.
Needless to say, we all benefit from this technology. Today, we do so much with AI, from adding things to our schedule, to texting each other, to finding fresh, new music.
With such power and flexibility, however, AI has the potential to displace workers in jobs which require rote analysis and decision-making. These include jobs like drivers, waiters, and repair technicians. While AI may not currently be able to handle these jobs, as it advances, it will no doubt overtake these positions.
Replacing people with machines seems like a preposterous idea, but we’ve already begun. Take the college life, for example. Registering for classes, scheduling appointments, and submitting and grading schoolwork used to require staff to listen and process your words, then to take actions based on them. Today, it’s all automated.
Oh, and don’t forget the privacy implications:
Burger King’s ploy was to activate Google’s AI through the television. Clever, but it horrible backfired as internet users started to edit the Wikipedia page to make the AI read off ingredients like cyanide.
The backlash came from concerns over the invasion of privacy. Many felt it was invasive for the company to activate the AI without their consent. Google updated its AI so it wouldn’t read the Whopper’s ingredient list out, but the concerns over AI privacy still remain. Do advertisers have a right to use our personal equipment to advertise? They already use terabytes of our personal data.
There’s huge damage potential, but there’s also huge benefit potential. If we become reliant on these machines to fulfill every need and desire, we have a very real possibility of losing the experiences and interactions that make us human. On the flip side, if we offload extraneous work to AI and intentionally pursue human interaction and relationship, we will find ourselves much better off.
I’d love to discuss this! Leave a comment below to get the conversation started: just sign in with your Google account and write something in the box below the jump!
