Daniel Ibrahim

Negative Outcomes For Humanity From Advancements In AI

Human society stands to gain a lot from the advancement in AI but as with most of human progress there are many negative outcomes that may occur. These negative outcomes are bound to occur where oversight is weak and the profit motive or brinksmanship supersedes fairness, empathy and altruism.

This article identifies some of the negative outcomes which may occur if the advancement of AI goes awry. These negative outcomes will mostly occur due to moral weakness on the part of people who develop and control AI. A lot of these outcomes are avoidable but this will require a great deal of conscientious action from business and political leadership.

AI Will Sweep Many Jobs Away

Automation and lateral cognitive capabilities gives AI some edge over human reasoning. Human intelligence still retains a lot of its native aspects, like the originality of spontaneous emotions, which will never be replicated by machines. However, the intelligence that is needed to perform at breathtakingly incredible speed and with immense energy in the workplace is itself more native to machines than men. This gap in performance will see so many people leaving so many workplaces in the world. A lot of people will be turned out of work and one big fear is that they will be turned loose, to drift without hope in social space. One thing that heightens this fear is the fact that AI seems set to deepen economic inequalities even more sharply than machines did in the first industrial revolution. In the first industrial revolution, machines reduced the size of the human workforce. At the moment, AI seems only capable of taking more people out of work, more than it will be able to create jobs for them, once they are turned out of work.

AI May Jeopardize Privacy On A Large Scale

The use of AI all over the world comes with the social risk of a massive intrusion into the private and public spaces of people’s lives. One of the most irksome things about AI based systems of public technology, is that they can store, interpret and predict data but restrict the process to the control of a few. This implies that a few data managers would be able to make accurately correct judgments about the way people exist and how they may react or respond to the whole gamut of experience they may have in life. This gives a very spooky feeling that somebody, especially somebody without good intentions may be watching over your shoulder digitally. Seldom will you ever find people anywhere, who want to give up the autonomy of their private lives to second or third parties beyond their close social circles, which consists of only family and friends. As the application of AI spreads massive public data will be collected from so many sources, from face scanners to security cameras in banks, schools, airports, parks, streets etc. There will always be the fear that these data could fall into the wrong hands or will be used quite wrongly to criminally or coercively target people.

AI May Distort Public Information And Identity

The possibility of creating deep fakes opens up the world to the risk of information and identity distortion. Using technology that is created with AI, it is now possible to create realistic misrepresentations of people and events. Deep fake misrepresentations could falsely portray people saying or doing things they are not even aware of. This could be very hurtful to people and organizations as individuals, businesses and public figures. Deep fakes could be used to undermine businesses, politicians and popular people by getting their virtual but realistically looking representations to do negative things. These negative things could include simulating unethical conduct for businesses and politicians or portraying popular people in compromising postures etc. As AI largely has the potential to learn from a mass body of data, it would be possible to feed sufficient information about people, businesses or politicians into AI systems and then train them to mimic their targets efficiently. For a world that has not successfully overcome the problem of fake news and information online, it would be hard to curtail the excesses of deep fakers once they become sophisticated. The modern mind is conditioned to absorb first impressions as truthful, therefore, it would take a lot of persuasion to convince people that fake information is not true. The looming cloud of misrepresentations is very ominous indeed.

AI May Spark An Anti-Trust Crisis In The Global Economy

Stronger economic actors with more power like China, the USA, and Russia are deeply entrenching their positions in the sphere of AI. Richer economic actors like Google, Amazon, Softbank, Sensetime and Microsoft are also buying their way into commanding market positions in that sphere as well. In the coming years, massive capital and state power will be the underlying forces controlling the direction and development of AI. The knowledge and application of AI may grow exponentially worldwide but the infrastructure and the big capital dynamics of AI will be under the control of a few political and economic monopolies, who may keep a firm and unshakeable grip on AI worldwide. This will help them to stifle and wear out little-sized competitors or recruit them as thoroughly subordinate partners, on their strongly monopolized platforms. The monopoly of the AI sphere could lead to a situation where only a few companies control a lot of artificially intelligent processes. These companies could have a very shrewd and tacit consensus among themselves to reduce competition and control prices, while making huge profits. This implies that banking, public security, news and information, education etc. could be controlled by only a few political or business entities. If this situation occurs, across overlapping political and legal boundaries, what laws or regulations will be in place to restrict these non-competitively growing entities, who may grow so domineeringly big to the detriment of the whole world. What anti-trust laws will emerge to check a loose economic cartel that locks the global economic value of AI, in a vice-grip.

AI Will Make Future Wars More Deadly

The new scope and scale of global wars may be tactically altered with ultra-precision weaponry and technology developed by AI or from the pool of innovations that are related to it. AI may spark a new arms race that is tactically and laterally devastating and very difficult to control. By providing states and non-state military actors with the means, models and modes for efficient warfare, AI will take wars to a whole new level of unprecedented destruction . AI systems can be deployed to battlefields and war games to learn, improvise and improve military strategy and weapons with a surprising dexterity, that may surpass the best of the trained eyes and minds of human military personnel . AI will also make it very possible to develop weapons and military systems that can combine the terrestrial and extra – terrestrial spheres as new fields of joint operations . Using AI based systems of communication, design, modeling and testing, wars will simply go over the edge and will also set the world on the edge.

AI Will Lead To Hyper-diversification And Hyper-competition

AI will give a lot of people and businesses the chance to create a lot of economic value to the point that people are largely spoilt for choice. Many businesses and business ideas will emerge across a wide range of sectors and industries, in a convoluted form that will eventually and seriously whittle down the competitive edge of doing business globally. AI based economic production gives the world the risk of over-saturation. Enhanced automation and deep learning by AI will soon become widely available that all it takes to get started with AI, will be to signup to an openly accessible site like GitHub. This will also add to the existing density of information overload in the modern marketplace, especially the modern digital marketplace, as more and more valuable products and services crowd the market . It will also lead to organic or strategically enforced measures for sifting out businesses and these measures may be controlled by deeply entrenched and dominant proprietary platforms that may choose which businesses to prop up or sink under the radar of market information available on the platform. As a result people may find it very difficult to really get good value for money, as they will not be directly controlling the algorithms that process market information on a proprietary platform. Some of these algorithms could be rigged(manipulated) in favor of the proprietary platform’s business interests, such as selling its own products or services while billing others to compete with these products or services on the platform, unfairly. Buyers may become informatively docile because quality will be generally assured but not fairly presented on these platforms. Dealing with a large pile of data about products and services that are similarlally valuable may be the new tedium of tomorrow’s marketplace. This tedium could be unscrupulously exploited by business interests. People will rather assume as a rule of thumb that whatever is placed on the front and first pages by proprietary platforms are the very best of the best, thus, avoiding the painful-need to look deeper.