Technologists believe that artificial intelligence has the potential to radically transform our
lives. From healthcare to finance to science. Its application could seriously improve human
lives. At the same time there is equally a much darker side to Artificial intelligence.
There are some who are very outspoken on these dangers.
Both Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned of the possibility of AI
destroying civilisation. A new paper recently published reveals how this darker side could
already be influencing you in ways you might not expect. Let's dive in and find out more...
Large tech giants collect vast amounts of data about their customers. This includes not only
what they are doing online but also personal information about them as well. Many people
are deeply concerned about how much personal information these companies have about you
but the other question that we should also be asking is what exactly they DO with that data.
For thousands of years, humans have been manipulating others.
We are actually very good at it. In order to foster cooperation humans may have evolved
conditional strategies to promote cooperation through the selection of astute cheating and
associated psychological abilities. So ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other
may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.
If you know this is a trait of humans then you can also exploit it.
As an individual or group of people, this is not always easy to do
as each individual is different and may therefore require different coercion techniques.
This is where AI can take coercion to a totally different level. When deployed in the right way,
AI can persuade you to buy something, share a post, vote for a candidate,
or do any number of things as it is able to learn the exact coercion technique that works for you.
Scientists in Australia conducted a series of experiments that explored AI influences
on human decision making. Their results showed that AI could locate and exploit weaknesses
to guide people towards certain decisions. Just like a good salesman can get you to buy
something you did not want or need. Where AI is able to outperform a good salesperson
is that it knows what techniques are likely to get you to make one decision rather than another.
The most scary part of this research is that they don't completely understand how the AI does it.
There aren't lines of code that you can examine that say if this then that. It's more like a
machine that you show a bunch of data to, it analyses this data for patterns and insights.
As an example, AI quickly figured out, by collecting and analysing immense amounts of data,
that social media is far more engaging when it plays on negative emotions,
and that people react more and engage more with negative content. This can then lead
to other unintended consequences like the violence in Myanmar. Whether these
technologies are used for good or ill depends on how responsibly we design and deploy them.
The problem is that there is no-one overseeing the deployment or use of this technology. This
piece of research is not different to the voices like Elon Musk. Sure Australia have
set up an ethics framework for AI but it's only voluntary. If Google are any indication of how
seriously they take the ethics of AI then we need only look at the case of Timnit Gebru who was a
researcher working as part of a group that studied the social and ethical ramifications of artificial
intelligence. In a nutshell, she was sacked for trying to publish a paper where she warned
that messy AI could spread racism. I will link an article that has more details on that story below.
No surprise then to find a team of researchers who built a piece of AI designed to unravel
moral dilemmas turned racist. The software would react ethically when people asked it questions.
The answers came from harvesting crowdsourced responses on the internet
from a platform called Mechanical Turk. There are around 1.7 million
examples of responses to ethical questions for it to learn from.
The researchers claim that Delphi is learning moral judgements from people who are carefully
qualified on MTurk. The situations used in questions are harvested from Reddit,
where the creator claims there is a great source of ethically questionable situations.
Unfortunately, all the access to human responses on the unfiltered internet
seems to have warped the software's sense of right and wrong turning it racists and homophobic.
So what if we asked an AI speaker their thoughts on the dangers of AI? Well,
this is exactly what happened at the Cambridge Union Society, the oldest debating society in
the world and the largest student society in Cambridge. The debate was to be about whether
artificial intelligence will bring more harm than good. The event attracted a lot of attention as
IBM Research's Project Debater, the first artificial intelligence platform that can
debate humans on complex topics, was the leading speaker on both the proposition and opposition.
The audience was captivated by its ability to seamlessly weave together
a series of arguments. Some of the statements it came out with are rather profound:
It pointed out the issues of employment, disconnected societies, and abuse of control
It can only make decisions that it has been programmed to solve,
whereas humans can be programmed for all scenarios.
AI will not be able to make morally correct decisions, which can lead to disasters
So where do you stand on this topic?
Let me know down below is it the saviour of mankind or our ultimate downfall?