Daniel Ibrahim

The Gains And The Pitfalls Of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence or AI for short is riding the waves of unprecedented popularity and adaptation in the real world especially in the western world and the emerging economies of Russia, China, India, South Korea and others. For the first time in human history, mankind stands on the cusp of a revolutionary technological order that will bring previously un-imagined productivity to workplaces and other social spaces of the world through enhanced automation and lateral cognition capabilities . The flipside however is that a lot of human workers will lose their spots in the workplace and become permanently redundant. This is in addition to other salient concerns that strike at the social core of humanity, such as the loss of privacy and the enhanced prospects for smarter but more devastating warfare. In this post we take a little dive into the most salient aspects of AI as it relates to wider human society. Therefore, we ask what are the gains that accrue from AI and what dangers does AI pose for humanity.

As to the gains of AI these are enormous. We would see a lot of enhanced automation and the rise of lateral cognitive capabilities that may significantly outperform human tasking and cognitive capabilities. We would also see a lot of deep learning capabilities that can handle very dense masses of data and convert these masses of data into novel products and services that will diversify the entire economic landscape on planet earth. Public security will also be enhanced and crime could be reduced to the barest minimum. Banking services would also become grossly smarter as special algorithms could easily filter people into more accurate personality subsets and tailor the right financial products that suits their existential realities in a holistic sense. Weather forecasting would also enjoy the benefits of enhanced accuracy and this will not just enhance local and international traveling, it will also boost agriculture in a very profound manner, globally enhancing food security in the process.

As to the dangers of AI, these are very ominous and they strike at the heart of all that makes us essentially human. In the first place a larger part of humanity runs the risk of sliding into docility. This docility will affect many white, blue and grey collar workers in a rapidly down-sliding curve on the social graphs. As humans are relegated to the backstage of work, what happens next. More people will have to live on social welfare, and other parts of their lives may be strongly dictated by governments as well. AI will surely bring more economic diversity(in terms of production) and in a world where tastes have become more globalized and this could lead to a situation where many people are spoiled for choice as economic competition riding on the wings of unprecedented innovation becomes hyper-intensive and hyper-extensive. AI will enhance public security but it may do very little to stop state-based crimes against citizens and the invasion of the private spaces of many individuals, by the state, leading to an Orwellian dystopia in many countries. Banking may get smarter but may become more discriminatory, as financial institutions strive for more efficiency they may weed out the vulnerable segments of society they are supposed to build, leaving room for only a few economically sturdy individuals. Weather forecasting will improve but at the cost of new monitoring stations in space which may be bases for covert espionage by the more technogically adept nations. This may offset the global balance of power and throw in a more sinister overcast of anarchy and chaos – into international affairs that is parallel to the apocalyptic arms race of science fiction, engineered by sadistic villains and mad scientists . The end result will be a space race that is fueled by AI and refined for military purposes, with unlimited capacities for dangerous cloak and dagger actions.