Throughout history, people seem to have an innate drive to want to optimize every aspect of life. Social development was rather minuscule until the industrial revolution, which discovered how to enhance productivity beyond muscle power. Now, the same type of revolution is taking place only it's machine power overcoming brain power of humans. Public and private Corporations as well as world governments are seeking to understand the future possibilities of A.I. (artificial intelligence). This new technology could unlock the door to questions of which people might not even know to ask yet. Although the possibilities are seemingly endless, there is plenty of cause for concern as to why this black box technology could change the human experience.
The most visible pioneers of artificial intelligence can be found in Silicon Valley. Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and others here in the U.S. have utilized the ability of A.I. in order to create algorithms which in theory maximize their customers' engagement and profits as a result. The downside of doing so comes from a privacy standpoint. In order to conduct the solutions outputted by these machine algorithms, the companies need to buy massive amounts of customer data which is made available to them. Once the data is available, Google can access someone's search history or Facebook can recommend certain groups. This has raised several questions about ethics in technology, and as it was stated in the documentary there is a difference between a third party or tech giant having a right to know about you and a right to "no" in that someone can refuse to have their information sold to these companies. Grumblings about industrial capitalism turning to surveillance capitalism are still in full throat today in 2021.
Once the wiz kids of Silicon Valley figured out a way to utilize this machine learning, it was only a matter of time before governments wanted a piece of the action. The U.S. began the arms race for A.I. with a sizable lead, but that advantage has since dwindled with the Xi Jinping administration since the early 2010's. President Xi has set in motion a variety of initiatives with the intention of China catching up to
America in A.I. by 2025 and taking the lead by 2030. So far, it appears to be working. Some of China's plans for A.I. are different than America's though. A primary example of this comes from Megvii, a Chinese tech company which specializes in deep learning and facial recognition. What has resulted is a futuristic-type society in which people can do tasks such as grocery shopping or bike rental through the use of just their face. It also was speculated that this technology could be used as a type of social credit score which would track one's behavior and handle rewards or punishment as a result.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of A.I. comes from its ability to displace the needs for humans in the workplace. There could be an unprecedented labor force disruption inbound that can't yet be imagined because the computer scientists haven't figured out the most optimal form of this intelligence. Kai-Fu Lee made the point that A.I. could displace 50% or more of human jobs and might actually disproportionately do so for white collar job workers since brain power required in those jobs could be easily replaced by a fully operational super-computer. This twist also begs the question of what will become of blue collar workers. The town of Saginaw, Michigan was shown to be already behind the eight ball in terms of quality of life with hardly any median income growth since World War II. With the rise of A.I., who knows if jobs such as trucking or manufacturing could go fully machine in the future.
Much is still to be discovered about what A.I. can do. Today's machines are starting to take on more complex tasks such as handling e-commerce distributions whether at the warehouses or actually delivering packages themselves. Other uses relate more towards leisure or governing. This superintelligence will undoubtedly alter the course of human history and reshape daily life. However, the possibility still exists that this tech could be mankind's undoing. Hopefully, humans find a way to leverage this groundbreaking discovery in a way that benefits all people and not just a few technology oligarchs or party leaders.
Sources:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/
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