Group items tagged

If China, Russia and the U.S. are in a race for AI supremacy, the kind of manifestations of AI will be so significant, they could alter the entire future of human civilization.

THE EXPONENTIAL THREATFrom drones, to nanobots to 3D-printing, automation could lead to unparalleled changes to how we live and work. In spite of the increase in global GDP, most people’s quality of living is not likely to see the benefit as it will increasingly be funneled into the pockets of the 1%. Capitalism then, favors the development of an AI that’s fundamentally exploitative to the common global citizen.Just as we exchanged our personal data for convenience and the illusion of social connection online, we will barter convenience for a world a global police state where social credit systems and AI decide how much of a “human stipend” (basic income) we receive. Our poverty or the social privilege we are born into, may have a more obscure relationship to a global system where AI monitors every aspect of our lives.Eventually AI will itself be the CEOs, inventors, master engineers and creator of more efficient robots. That’s when we will know that AI has indeed replaced human beings. What will Google’s DeepMind be able to do with the full use of next-gen quantum computing and supercomputers?

Artificial Intelligence Will Replace HumansTo argue that AI and robots and 3D-printing and any other significant technology won’t impact and replace many human jobs, is incredibly irresponsible.That’s not to say humans won’t adapt, and even thrive in more creative, social and meaningful work!That AI replacing repetitive tasks is a good thing, can hardly be denied. But will it benefit all globally citizens equally? Will ethics, common sense and collective pragmatism and social inclusion prevail over profiteers?Will younger value systems such as decentralization and sustainable living thrive with the advances of artificial intelligence?Will human beings be able to find sufficient meaning in a life where many of them won’t have a designated occupation to fill their time?These are the question that futurists like me ponder, and you should too.

But not everyone will be equally represented in that data.

And sometimes, even when ample data exists, those who build the training sets don’t take deliberate measures to ensure its diversity

The power of the system is its “ability to recognize that correlations occur between gender and professions,” says Kathryn Hume. “The downside is that there’s no intentionality behind the system—it’s just math picking up on correlations. It doesn’t know this is a sensitive issue.” There’s a tension between the futuristic and the archaic at play in this technology. AI is evolving much more rapidly than the data it has to work with, so it’s destined not just to reflect and replicate biases but also to prolong and reinforce them.

Accordingly, groups that have been the target of systemic discrimination by institutions that include police forces and courts don’t fare any better when judgment is handed over to a machine.

A growing field of research, in fact, now looks to apply algorithmic solutions to the problems of algorithmic bias.

Still, algorithmic interventions only do so much; addressing bias also demands diversity in the programmers who are training machines in the first place.

A growing awareness of algorithmic bias isn’t only a chance to intervene in our approaches to building AI systems. It’s an opportunity to interrogate why the data we’ve created looks like this and what prejudices continue to shape a society that allows these patterns in the data to emerge.

Of course, there’s another solution, elegant in its simplicity and fundamentally fair: get better data.

This new education model would then become the basis of the global economy, like the base of a pyramid. During these years, and throughout their education, each child would pay for their own education through “time dollars”.

It would become the first global economy which standardizes and binds the economic trade of all market forces, known and unknown, to the only universal equality on this planet: time.