A I and contemporary challenges: The good, bad and the scary

摘要

On 29 March 2023, over 1,000 technology leaders and researchers, including Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder of Apple; Elon Musk of Tesla; Rachel Bronson, President of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; Tristan Harris, Yoshua Bengio, among others, called for a moratorium on the artificial intelligence (AI) system’s research and development. All these leaders realized that AI represents ‘profound risks to society and humanity’. This open letter from Future of Life Institute stressed that, ‘powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable’(Future of Life Institute, 2023). At the same time there are equal number of other technology leaders like Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China who are quite optimistic about the future of AI in society. He argued in his recent book on AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order that there is a vision in which artificial intelligence transforms key economic sectors and that office worker in 2040 will travel in autonomous vehicle. Kai-Fu Lee is quite optimistic about AI. ‘As we progress with complex tasks such as developing autonomous vehicles and using AI in health care, deep learning will likely yield new enhancements. In the next 5-10 years, deep learning will still be AI’s largest underpinning platform, but new, brilliant ideas like convolutional neural networks (CNNs)and self-supervised learning (SSL) will be built on top to solve previously insurmountable problems’(McKinsey & Company Report, 2022). The emergence of the 4th Industrial Revolution technologies and the current discourse on AI and society has posed a number of challenges (Krishna, 2014. It has brought into sharp focus the sociological perspectives of technological determinism versus the social shaping of technology. The General Conference of the UNESCO in November 2021 issued a series of recommendations on ‘the ethics of Artificial Intelligence’. In no uncertain terms this international body expressed concern on the profound and dynamic positive and negative impact of AI on societies on all its dimensions of everyday living. Further, it clearly spelled out that AI technologies ‘can deepen existing divides and inequalities in the world, within and between countries, and that justice, trust and fairness must be upheld so that no country and no one should be left behind’(Unesco Report on Ethics of AI, 2021). The way in which powerful AI technologies could transform our lives, society, economics, governance and most importantly ethics and morality surrounding it is quite popular in every day news media as well as our drawing room discussions at home. There is considerable confusion among individuals and communities on the impact of AI. Profit seeking global mega corporations have already poured in billions of dollars in AI research and development to maximise their profits. On the other hand, there are scary and dangerous scenarios shaping up on the impact and use of AI tools. Rouge and non-state actors are weaponizing AI technologies as well as giving rise to new fake platforms. We are not far away from killer robots, autonomous weapons and robotic war fare as depicted in the film Slaughterbots. The main purpose and objective of this essay is to understand what is good, bad and the scary of AI developments? What are the positive and negative impacts of AI on our contemporary society? Should we leave AI technology within the perspective of technological determinism or is there a scope to socially shape the new technology for the benefit of our society. These are some of the important issues that will be addressed in this essay.