Writing for an Academic Discussion Does potentioal of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweith the ethical and socio-economic concerns? - revised -

Does the potential of AI to improve our lives and boost economic growth outweigh the ethical and socio-economic concerns, or should we be more cautious in the adoption and development of AI?

（Class on the implications of artificial intelligence）

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        Read the following fable on AI. What is its moral?

 

Once upon a time, there was an old woman whose son was a soldier fighting in a war zone.

One day, she met a powerful AI, which said to her, “I’ll make your wish come true, but I can do it only once.”

She said to the AI, “I’d like to get my son back.”

The AI said, “Ok, I’ll get your son back to you tomorrow.”

The next day, a coffin came to the woman’s house.

She opened it and found her dead son inside.

 

2.        How do you feel about a child raised by an AI nanny and taught by AI tutors? What causes the feeling?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

1.        AI has exponentially advanced various areas of our life such as the Internet, healthcare, transportation, communication, architecture, music and art, and financial and retailing businesses.

2.        AI does complicated calculations to tackle the challenges like climate change and population increase.

3.        AI is an enhancement of our brain activities. Like other sophisticated devises such as electric dictionary and smart phones, our productivity will rise through the use of AI.

4.        It is said that you can learn with a human tutor twice as faster than when you learn alone while you can learn four times faster when you learn with an AI.

5.        In 2015, world-renowned thinkers cautioned about the threat of AI. According to them, it’s highly likely that we’ll lose control of AI in the future since AI evolves much faster than humans. In 2025, “Godfather of AI” also expressed warning. He is especially concerned about its military use such as autonomous weapons. He also says a drastic change may occur suddenly in a very short time before we know.

6.        Israeli surveillance systems with AI are monitoring every single person in Gaza and have helped to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people there, half of them children.

7.        No one knows how artificial intelligence works. What it does is unpredictable. It works exponentially faster than humans and it can work non-stop. Moreover, the date on the Internet is free to use for AI.

8.        AI doesn’t care about life. It can destroy life to carry out its objective. In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, a computer program kills humans when it decides them as obstacles of the task it’s been programed to do.

9.        On the one hand, computers are more morally correct than humans. On the other hand, it has been known that they learn prejudice through interactions with humans.

10.     AI jobs lack human-touch. AI has no real empathy. It is unable to make a joke. It does not have the same biological body we have, so it will never have the same consciousness or workings of human mind. However, humans can feel attachment to non-living things. They are also gullible to fictions.

11.     In hiring, AI that sorts out job applications before the human resources manager interviews them choses photos of the same type of faces that look like those of applicants chosen in the past from its data input. An AI-robot hotel in Tokyo, although it enjoyed many curious visitors at the beginning, started to hire humans several months later because of malfunctions and lack of flexibility.

 

 

☆Response for Ideas and Expressions

My fear is that AI can transform our mental conditions. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Phillip K. Dick predicted a future where androids are so similar to humans as to make it difficult to tell the difference between them and us. Although humans can tell that androids lack something human, androids sometimes act more humanely than real humans. This causes confusion in society, and it makes humans ask themselves what humanity really is. He also predicted a world which is run by singularity, an entity with consciousness in a network of computers. There, humans are not allowed to make decisions. Although a singularity has yet to exist, decision-making by AIs is already happening in such situations as AI predictions or when a machine translation is much better than ours and we lose confidence and become dependent on it. Thus, loss of our creativity can occur due to loss of free workings of our mind caused by dependence on AI.  (161 words)