The time has come. We are regularly hearing warnings from computer experts that AI now poses an extreme risk to humanity. As if we hadn’t come up with all the ideas in the sci-if books decades ago. Here’s my take…
I did my university dissertation on AI and whether it could replace people. Whilst doing my research, I was honestly surprised at how many examples already existed. The difference was back then, the AI machines were all designed to do one specific thing. Now we see that AI has access to the entire internet meaning it can learn a lot more and a lot faster.
The initial threat seems to be on our creativity. You have people who work on writing books for years, to then have an AI bot write a book in a matter of minutes. You have artists who spend hours drawing up their visions, to then have an AI be able to come up with multiple illustrations in seconds. It’s given lazy people a big short cut and that leads to a fear of artists being pushed out. AI is able to find the perfect formula for the perfect story, right? Well, I disagree.
It may seem impressive right now but it will be missing the soulful element. We don’t read words just to intake information, or even just to be entertained. We want to connect with art and that comes from emotion, something which AI lacks (at least at the moment). Even if it did feel, it wouldn’t be true emotion so people who appreciate books, music and art will always gravitate back to what real people have created. Even if the big guys try to push AI-produced content at us, if we don’t buy into it, they would have to accept that.
Moving onto the world of work. AI can replace a number of jobs and that’s something that has been happening for a number of years, unfortunately. A computer never gets tired and is constantly able to process data. Humans need time to sleep, eat and we can have severe situations in life which distract us from work. That’s not great for businesses and it’s up to them what their ethics are. Usually, a business wants to be as cost-effective as possible which means replacing people with machines. That wouldn’t be so bad if we could work on other things, but it’s hard to make money from your passions so if your job is replaced by a machine, it’s going to be hard to find a similar one and that is then a contributing factor to the unemployment rate. The population is increasing and the job availability is decreasing but the cost of living is also increasing so there is less support from governments.
One of the biggest fears is that AI will be able to control everything we do. If we have a smart home, that means AI could take over that. It could access our phones, laptops, TVs and do whatever it wants. It could restrict access to our funds and it could lock us inside. That’s the real stuff of nightmares.
For me, the most likely current risk is crime. AI is the perfect thing to hide behind. There was a hostage story involving AI, where a criminal used an AI voice generator to call up a lady and act as though he had kidnapped her daughter. AI played the role of mimicking the daughter's voice convincingly enough that the mother had to go along with it.
So, what happens now? A lot of people are trying to scare us into thinking it’s too late to do anything. AI is already everywhere and you can’t exactly switch it off. Well, this is where I disagree. Yes, it’s hard because technology is so heavily involved in our daily lives but maybe this is good. Maybe this means we can spend more time in the real world, face to face rather than relying on technology to keep us connected.
Companies will start putting safeguards in place. Banks will have to do something and they can use AI to come up with software to block things accessing it. You can protect yourself by not living too heavily online. AI becomes less powerful if we don’t use it. Think back to years ago. There was the Google Chatbot and that would work based on people’s inputs. The more people that used it, the more it was able to hold a realistic conversation. The less it was used, the less it would be able to converse. Laws and regulations are slowly being implemented that AI-generated content will have to be declared (as is now being done with adverts).
We will adapt as humans always have done but if it is something you are worried about, the best thing is not to input any of your data into AI chatbots at the moment. Be present in the physical world as much as you can and keep physical copies of important documents. Support businesses that are supporting the community and are doing their best to be ethically responsible. For now, that’s all we can do until we say where this new technology wave will take us.