Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is expanding every day. Research into the many advantages of AI are trumpeted across the media everyday: self-driving cars, service and cleaning robots, AI programs to make social media safer from foreign intrusion, AI to replace jobs and make services cheaper from legal services to production work. While there is a healthy discussion about the jobs that could be lost from automation and AI in the future (especially truck drivers), not much has been written about the very real dangers of AI.
Although there are many, let’s focus in on 3 big dangers of AI:
AI Weapons
Once weapons like guided missile systems make their own AI-based decisions on who lives or dies there are endless possibilities for mistakes and massacres. No matter how advanced the technology gets it is missing the adaptability and decision-making subtlety that a human being can provide. AI weapons also, of course, have the potential to get in the hands of some very bad individuals and be used ruthlessly against their enemies, adding to their dangers.
- Advertisement -Privacy Invasion
with the option to track people everywhere they go, advanced facial recognition technology, AI has the potential to become a kind of Big Brother than even George Orwell never would have dreamed of. China is currently rolling out it’s massive AI-run social credit surveillance system that scores and rewards and punishes citizens based on their behavior, opinions and actions, so the crossover where AI surveillance privacy invasion becomes actual control and manipulation of your life is a fine line. Privacy invasion is the sleeping giant in terms of the danger in AI tech.
Discrimination
The amount of information an AI system or an AI robot can collect on you makes it very possible it can treat you differently. Imagine a Robocop future where an AI banking bot tells you you will not qualify for a loan because you were recorded the day before getting angry about your finances with your wife, or an AI-hiring system rejecting you because your social credit score is too low based on being late for the bus, insulting your country’s political leader or smoking in public in a non-designated area. Another distinct possibility is that advanced AI may stop caring about issues like human rights or racism and simply judge people based on categories, statistics and prejudices based on numerical averages, leading to inhumane treatment and application of the law.
