Blog #10: Living in the Age of AI

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a wonder. It has developed vastly over the years and it has helped people in many areas, but it has also created a vast number of problems.

In the video we watched in class, I learned a lot about AI. AI is becoming increasingly scary with every new task it can do.

To understand how Artificial Intelligence is able to do almost any task a human can do, it has to have data to read and analyze. Where does the data it is fed come from? Every citizen.

Due to AI becoming better, it is taking over things like the work force. Jobs that are normally performed by a human can be performed faster and cost less if it is performed by a machine.

Most companies like this alternative because they do not have to pay a machine to do the same job a human would. The cherry on top for companies is that machines have a greater productivity rate than humans.

This means that companies can make more money from machines than they would if they paid a human to do that exact same job. These facts are scary.

While it is beneficial to society that companies make enough money to stay in business, these machines are coming for our jobs. In the coming years, more jobs will be performed by machines and humans will not be needed to complete the need for specific jobs.

It has become normal to see self-checkouts in every store instead of being checked out by a person. There are benefits to this and downsides that come with it.

Some of the benefits that stem from Artificial Intelligence is automation, medical progression, perform repetitive tasks, and minimizing errors. These are just a few of the benefits that AI brings us.

Automation is made easier by Artificial Intelligence because AI can set up machines to follow commands very quickly. A computer can do a repetitive task over and over again without getting tired, unlike a human.

AI can minimize errors because computers are able to do math quickly, efficiently, and in a timely manner. If humans had to do math constantly, they are liable to make errors in calculations.

Also, when building machines or products, it is important to get the design correct. Even if there is a slight error in the building process, it could be costly.

Automation scares me due to the amount of jobs that have been lost because of it. When someone loses their job, which is their source of income, it can be extremely hard to recover from that.

Furthermore, AI when dealing with the topic of automation means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Automation takes money away from hard working people and gives it to the rich who created or bought into the machines.

AI also impacts national security. While AI can be used to strengthen defense systems and find flaws in the system to further improve them, there are also downsides to it.

In order for AI to improve national security, they have to know exactly what is going on in their country at all times. China is a great example of this.

China tracks their citizens wherever they go. They have a project called Sharp Eyes, which is being used to put cameras on the corner of every street and village.

China believes that if they know what every one of their citizens is doing at every moment of the day, then it will make them a more secure nation. The downside to this is that no citizen has any privacy from the government or the ability to speak out against the government. It gives the government a new way to silence people that did not exist before.

Also, China has used this surveillance system to punish people of a certain ethnic group and scan the country for people who need to be "re-educated". Re-education camps are a way for the Chinese government to force or try to convince people to behave, believe, or act a certain way.

This leads me to my last point about AI, online security. Due to AI needing to collect people's information/data they leave online, it takes away privacy and security people believe they have when they are online.

In the video, it was stated that Google found out that whenever users would make a search, they would leave bits of data left behind. This was a gold mine for Google.

Google realized just how valuable this information could be if they sold it to third parties and investors began pressuring Google to make more money so they could make more money. Not only this, the data users left behind when they made a search was used in computer algorithms to predict what people would likely search.

Now, anyone can get a piece of the action if they have enough money and are willing to buy into it. This means that it is not just big companies who have their hands on your information, it could be millionaires and billionaires as well.

Companies want to collect every piece of information their is to collect about a person. It ranges from credit card data to information about women's menstrual cycles.

Some important things I learned from the video was to be careful about what you post online because you never know how it is going to be used. Also, I learned that AI can affect my life more than I thought it could because of everything it capable of doing.

What scares me is knowing that AI continues to improve everyday and knowing that it does more than I am comfortable with. There should be limits to AI so it does not derail everyone's life and we do not know what to do without it.