Recently I read this article The Metamorphosis that talks about AI (Artificial Intelligence), its positive & negative impact on our society(which is already in motion), as well as the invented social conundrums that goes along with it.
AI has been in use for the past few decades in various forms. Either it's voice recognition on a phone to guide you through a pre-fabricated menu or auto correction on your preferred word processor. It started with automating mundane, repetitive tasks to free up the human intelligence to tasks that require additional attention or were difficult to automate. Human touch was required to tasks, that were either prone to errors on automation or the return on investment (ROI) was not sufficient enough to garner attention. It seemed that the AI's requirement of costly processing power was not able to compete with cheap Human brain power.
In the beginning of this decade, few pieces of the AI puzzle started to fall in its place and that propelled its adoption.
- Cheap CPU cycles
- Cheap Storage
- Cheap Data
With the advent of Social media, the explosive power of search and moving all our daily activities to a digital platform; they became the source of fire hose of data, that could be channeled and collected on flexible cloud infrastructure with cheap CPU and Storage. This formed the underlying basis of big data and the analysis of this data for patterns and anomalies led to breakthrough in solving various problems. This includes and not limited to targeted advertisements, credit card fraud, predicting stock sentiments and so forth.
Humans as a species have always tried to evolve forward, either through discovery or by invention. But as apart of that process, there has been collateral damage in the wake of progress. When the Spaniards landed at Central America, they decimated the local population with their diseases, but the world was introduced to this new continent along with its abundance of natural resources and culture.
With AI, progress would be made in various fields(insurance, medicine) and AI systems would be allowed to make decisions, that would affect human lives. The decision could be as simple as; approving an application for health insurance considering the various aspects of the applicant, age, or propensity of the applicant to fall sick often. Or a decision to prescribe a life saving drug(limited resource), considering the propensity of the applicant to be a drug abuser or a negative impact to society.
Humans already have similar decisions on things like organ transplant, but we are at peace with this decision, since we know it was an informed decision by a respectable quorum of doctors. Would we be fine with this, if that decision was left to an AI. What if, there was a bug in the algorithm that skewed the decision making process. AI algorithms and the data fed to these algorithms are generated by humans and humans by nature are biased. Be it along lines of race, religion or sexual orientation, but implicit bias is an issue that would have to be dealt with. We deal with this, by explaining the process used to achieve the result. Would an AI be able to rationalize its decision making process in human terms?
The ethical veracity of these AI decisions needs to be dissected before we let these systems rule all aspects of our lives.
In conclusion, AI systems will open up a plethora of opportunities from driverless cars to mining meteors for minerals. It also opens up a pandora's box, along the lines of social inequality and racial injustice. As humans, we have to pay attention to details and correct the system as required in an unbiased manner to continue to evolve as an intelligent species.
