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peterconnelly

Opinion | What to Do About Americans Who Love Their Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anti-gun-ad-campaign.html

guns new york times opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a kid took in a fair number of public service messages.
  • Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.
  • But simple messages stick, and when done well — particularly when lives are at stake — have proven highly effective.
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  • Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.
  • Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.
  • Obviously, not everyone transformed into responsible citizens while imbibing these messages between doses of Sugar Pops and “Scooby-Doo.”
  • Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.
  • Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.
  • Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters
  • Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.
criscimagnael

Can Forensic Science Be Trusted? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629632

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • When asked, years later, why she had failed to photograph what she said she’d seen on the enhanced bedsheet, Yezzo replied, “This is one time that I didn’t manage to get it soon enough.” She added: “Operator error.”
  • The words were deployed as definitive by prosecutors—“the evidence is uncontroverted by the scientist, totally uncontroverted”
  • Michael Donnelly, now a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, did not preside over this case, but he has had ample exposure to the use of forensic evidence. “As a trial judge,” he told me, “I sat there for 14 years. And when forensics experts testified, the jury hung on their every word.”
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  • Forensic science, which drives the plots of movies and television shows, is accorded great respect by the public. And in the proper hands, it can provide persuasive insight. But in the wrong hands, it can trap innocent people in a vise of seeming inerrancy—and it has done so far too often. What’s more, although some forensic disciplines, such as DNA analysis, are reliable, others have been shown to have serious limitations.
  • Yezzo is not like Annie Dookhan, a chemist in a Massachusetts crime laboratory who boosted her productivity by falsifying reports and by “dry labbing”—that is, reporting results without actually conducting any tests.
  • Nor is Yezzo like Michael West, a forensic odontologist who claimed that he could identify bite marks on a victim and then match those marks to a specific person.
  • The deeper issue with forensic science lies not in malfeasance or corruption—or utter incompetence—but in the gray area where Yezzo can be found. Her alleged personal problems are unusual: Only because of them did the details of her long career come to light.
  • to the point of alignment; how rarely an analyst’s skills are called into question in court; and how seldom the performance of crime labs is subjected to any true oversight.
  • More than half of those exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing had been wrongly convicted based on flawed forensic evidence.
  • The quality of the work done in crime labs is almost never audited.
  • Even the best forensic scientists can fall prey to unintentional bias.
  • Study after study has demonstrated the power of cognitive bias.
  • Cognitive bias can of course affect anyone, in any circumstance—but it is particularly dangerous in a criminal-justice system where forensic scientists have wide latitude as well as some incentive to support the views of prosecutors and the police.
Javier E

Opinion | What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk's Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ental-health-smart-phones.html

ultimate question cognitive resilience courses technology dependence purpose mission monastery distraction education learning knowledge

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
  • “You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.
  • Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.
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  • Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.
  • The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)
  • Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”
  • “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”
  • If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)
  • Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.
  • The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”
  • Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —
  • Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.
  • Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction
  • Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.
  • Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.
  • stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought
  • It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.
  • One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide
  • A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression
  • And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.
  • We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place
  • it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.
  • Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom
  • Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too
  • I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”
  • Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.
  • Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?
  • Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.
  • His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.
  • here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.
  • Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for
  • When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly
  • it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.
  • e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.
  • “On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”
  • Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.
  • “For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”
  • for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.
  • Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.
  • The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”
  • Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.
  • David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon
  • “At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’
  • For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”
  • “These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,
  • Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”
  • The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i
  • Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”
  • The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them
  • The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow
Javier E

Netanyahu's Dark Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675406

netanyahu AI realism musk crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.
  • “You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”
  • The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.
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  • The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.
  • Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”
  • By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”
  • Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right.
  • This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.
  • fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.
  • This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead
  • “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
  • To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag
  • In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.
Javier E

Nepal Bans TikTok, Saying It Disturbs 'Social Harmony' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...sturbs-social-harmony-760e99b2

nepal harmony tiktok ban social media technology

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • NEW DELHI—Nepal is banning TikTok over concerns that the video platform is “disturbing social harmony,
  • “Through social-media platform TikTok, there’s a continuous dissemination of content disturbing our social harmony and family structures,” said Sharma.
  • Nepal has faced increasing problems with TikTok, including cases of cyberbullying,
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  • Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.
  • Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.
  • India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.
  • Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.
Javier E

Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...human-behavior-nudge.html

behavioral economics nudge priming science research psychology ideology

shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
  • it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
  • Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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  • Behavioral economics is at the center of the so-called replication crisis, a euphemism for the uncomfortable fact that the results of a significant percentage of social science experiments can’t be reproduced in subsequent trials
  • this key result was not replicated in similar experiments, undermining confidence in a whole area of study. It’s obvious that we do associate old age and slower walking, and we probably do slow down sometimes when thinking about older people. It’s just not clear that that’s a law of the mind.
  • And these attempts to “correct” human behavior are based on tenuous science. The replication crisis doesn’t have a simple solution
  • Journals have instituted reforms like having scientists preregister their hypotheses to avoid the possibility of results being manipulated during the research. But that doesn’t change how many uncertain results are already out there, with a knock-on effect that ripples through huge segments of quantitative social scienc
  • The Johns Hopkins science historian Ruth Leys, author of a forthcoming book on priming research, points out that cognitive science is especially prone to building future studies off disputed results. Despite the replication crisis, these fields are a “train on wheels, the track is laid and almost nothing stops them,” Dr. Leys said.
  • These cases result from lax standards around data collection, which will hopefully be corrected. But they also result from strong financial incentives: the possibility of salaries, book deals and speaking and consulting fees that range into the millions. Researchers can get those prizes only if they can show “significant” findings.
  • It is no coincidence that behavioral economics, from Dr. Kahneman to today, tends to be pro-business. Science should be not just reproducible, but also free of obvious ideology.
  • Technology and modern data science have only further entrenched behavioral economics. Its findings have greatly influenced algorithm design.
  • The collection of personal data about our movements, purchases and preferences inform interventions in our behavior from the grocery store to who is arrested by the police.
  • Setting people up for safety and success and providing good default options isn’t bad in itself, but there are more sinister uses as well. After all, not everyone who wants to exploit your cognitive biases has your best interests at heart.
  • Despite all its flaws, behavioral economics continues to drive public policy, market research and the design of digital interfaces.
  • One might think that a kind of moratorium on applying such dubious science would be in order — except that enacting one would be practically impossible. These ideas are so embedded in our institutions and everyday life that a full-scale audit of the behavioral sciences would require bringing much of our society to a standstill.
  • There is no peer review for algorithms that determine entry to a stadium or access to credit. To perform even the most banal, everyday actions, you have to put implicit trust in unverified scientific results.
  • We can’t afford to defer questions about human nature, and the social and political policies that come from them, to commercialized “research” that is scientifically questionable and driven by ideology. Behavioral economics claims that humans aren’t rational.
  • That’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, and it should be fought out in a rigorous marketplace of ideas. Instead of unearthing real, valuable knowledge of human nature, behavioral economics gives us “one weird trick” to lose weight or quit smoking.
  • Humans may not be perfectly rational, but we can do better than the predictably irrational consequences that behavioral economics has left us with today.
Javier E

Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...silience-another-thing-we-cant

resilience psychology

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I also think that we as a society are failing to inculcate resilience in our young people, and that culture war has left many progressive people in the curious position of arguing against the importance of resilience
  • Sadly, nothing is complicated for progressives today. I think the attitude that all questions are simple and nothing is complicated is the second most prominent element of contemporary progressive social culture, beneath only lol lol lol lmao lol lo
  • Teaching people how to suffer, how to respond to suffering and survive suffering and grow from suffering, is one of the most essential tasks of any community. Because suffering is inevitable. And I do think that we have lost sight of this essential element of growing up in contemporary society
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  • Haidt isn’t helping himself any. The term “culture of victimhood” reminds many people of the “snowflake” insult, the idea than anyone from a marginalized background who complains about injustice is really just self-involved and weak.
  • I find his predictions about how these dynamics will somehow undermine American capitalism to be unconvincing, running towards bizarre. If social media is making our kids depressed and anxious, that is the reason to be concerned, not some tangled logic about national greatness.
  • I think that suffering is the only truly universal endowment of the human species.
  • ecause Haidt talked about a culture of victimhood, he was immediately coded as right-wing, which is to say on the wrong side of the culture war
  • (The piece notes that the age at which children are allowed to play outside alone has moved from 7 or 8 to 10 or 12 in short order.)
  • the critics of someone like Haidt, the most coherent criticism they mount is that talk of toughness and resilience can be used opportunistically to dismiss demands for justice. “You just need to toughen up” is not, obviously, a constructive, good-faith response to a demand that the police stop killing unarmed Black people
  • I don’t think that’s the version Haidt is articulating
  • Yes, we must do all we can to reduce injustice, and we need to be compassionate to everyone. But we also need to understand that no political movement, no matter how effective, can ever end suffering and thus obviate the need for resilience.
  • I’m really not a fan of therapy culture, where the imperatives and vocabulary and purpose of therapy are now assumed to be necessary in every domain of human affairs. But that’s not because I think therapy is bad; I think therapy, as therapy, is very good. It’s because I think everything can’t be therapy, and the effort to make everything therapy will have the perverse effect of making nothing therapy.
Javier E

Two recent surveys show AI will do more harm than good - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ai-polls-skeptics

ai survey public attitudes us technology

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A Monmouth University poll released last week found that only 9 percent of Americans believed that computers with artificial intelligence would do more good than harm to society.
  • When the same question was asked in a 1987 poll, a higher share of respondents – about one in five – said AI would do more good than harm,
  • In other words, people have less unqualified confidence in AI now than they did 35 years ago, when the technology was more science fiction than reality.
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  • The Pew Research Center survey asked people different questions but found similar doubts about AI. Just 15 percent of respondents said they were more excited than concerned about the increasing use of AI in daily life.
  • “It’s fantastic that there is public skepticism about AI. There absolutely should be,” said Meredith Broussard, an artificial intelligence researcher and professor at New York University.
  • Broussard said there can be no way to design artificial intelligence software to make inherently human decisions, like grading students’ tests or determining the course of medical treatment.
  • Most Americans essentially agree with Broussard that AI has a place in our lives, but not for everything.
  • Most people said it was a bad idea to use AI for military drones that try to distinguish between enemies and civilians or trucks making local deliveries without human drivers. Most respondents said it was a good idea for machines to perform risky jobs such as coal mining.
  • Roman Yampolskiy, an AI specialist at the University of Louisville engineering school, told me he’s concerned about how quickly technologists are building computers that are designed to “think” like the human brain and apply knowledge not just in one narrow area, like recommending Netflix movies, but for complex tasks that have tended to require human intelligence.
  • “We have an arms race between multiple untested technologies. That is my concern,” Yampolskiy said. (If you want to feel terrified, I recommend Yampolskiy’s research paper on the inability to control advanced AI.)
  • The term “AI” is a catch-all for everything from relatively uncontroversial technology, such as autocomplete in your web search queries, to the contentious software that promises to predict crime before it happens. Our fears about the latter might be overwhelming our beliefs about the benefits from more mundane AI.
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