Photo by Polimerek in MIT Museum during Wikimania 2006 via Wikimedia
Artificial Intelligence is impacting many aspects of human life and it is expanding its influence rapidly through a variety of applications.
But the use of artificial or cognitive technology is a mixed bag at best – with advantages in terms of efficient production and services and risks in the form of socioeconomic implications like loss of jobs.
In fact, many experts see more dangers than benefits from the sudden proliferation of the technology and introduction of robotic services.
The subject is going to be one of the prominent moot points at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Ahead of meetings of experts, the WEF released its Global Risks 2017 report, which spotlights both uses and threats that the AI and related technologies could potentially have for
“Myriad opportunities for economic benefit have created a stable flow of investment into AI research and development, but with the opportunities come risks to decision-making, security and governance,” it warns.
Authors of the report point out that increasingly intelligent systems supplanting both blue- and white-collar employees are exposing the fault lines in our economic and social systems and requiring policy-makers to look for measures that will build resilience to the impact of automation.
On the positive side, machine learning techniques are now revealing valuable patterns in large data sets and adding value to enterprises by tackling problems at a scale beyond human capability.
For example, Stanford’s computational pathologist (C-Path) has highlighted unnoticed indicators for breast cancer by analyzing thousands of cellular features on hundreds of tumour images, while DeepMind increased the power usage efficiency of Alphabet Inc.’s data centers by 15%, compilers say.
AI applications can reduce costs and improve diagnostics with staggering speed and surprising creativity, the report notes.
At the same time, it wars that AI could one day pose an existential threat like a “superintelligence” might pursue goals that prove not to be aligned with the continued existence of humankind.
Such fears relate to “strong” AI or “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), which would be the equivalent of human-level awareness, but which does not yet exist, an analysis in the report notes.
Current AI applications are forms of “weak” or “narrow” AI or “artificial specialized intelligence” (ASI); they are directed at solving specific problems or taking actions within a limited set of parameters, some of which may be unknown and must be discovered and learned, it says.
Citing instances where the technologies are applied, the report notes that tasks such as trading stocks, writing sports summaries, flying military planes and keeping a car within its lane on the highway are now all within the domain of ASI.
“As ASI applications expand, so do the risks of these applications operating in unforeseeable ways or outside the control of humans.”
The 2010 and 2015 stock market “flash crashes” illustrate how ASI applications can have unanticipated real-world impacts, while AlphaGo shows how ASI can surprise human experts with novel but effective tactics, the report explains.
In combination with robotics, AI applications are already affecting employment and shaping risks related to social inequality, writers of the report warn.
“AI has great potential to augment human decision-making by countering cognitive biases and making rapid sense of extremely large data sets: at least one venture capital firm has already appointed an AI application to help determine its financial decisions.
“Gradually removing human oversight can increase efficiency and is necessary for some applications, such as automated vehicles. However, there are dangers in coming to depend entirely on the decisions of AI systems when we do not fully understand how the systems are making those decisions.”
Explaining some of the implications, the report notes that in any complex and chaotic system, including AI systems, potential dangers include mismanagement, design vulnerabilities, accidents and unforeseen occurrences
“These pose serious challenges to ensuring the security and safety of individuals, governments and enterprises. It may be tolerable for a bug to cause an AI mobile phone application to freeze or misunderstand a request, for example, but when an AI weapons system or autonomous navigation system encounters a mistake in a line of code, the results could be lethal.”
Then there are several other implications like stealth, infringement on privacy, illegal storage of information, dangers to social media, threats to automobile functioning, vulnerability and disruption of strategic systems that could arise from a greater reliance on the use of AI and other modern technologies.
In the immediate context, the spread of AI technologies will take away a lot of white-collar jobs in sectors like health and finance. Rapid advances in technologies have already reduced a large number of blue-collar employment opportunities.
Going forward, it appears that a concerted effort drawing on clearly defined principles governance, rules of the game, a system of checks and balances and scientific vigilance vis-a-vis evolving technologies may offer answers to some of the questions about pitfalls that societies could encounter in the near future.
