![]() Every day, these harms present existential risks it is existential to someone who is relying on public benefits that those benefits be delivered accurately and on time. These kinds of biases are present in AI systems already, operating in invisible ways and at increasingly large scales: falsely accusing people of crimes, determining whether people find public housing, automating CV screening and job interviews. Why should someone who has been falsely accused of a crime by a facial recognition system be excited about AI? Biases, usually against people who are poor or marginalised, appear in many parts of the process, including in the training data and how the model is deployed, resulting in discriminatory outcomes. In many cases, this amounts to a “ suspicion machine”, whereby governments make incredibly high-stakes mistakes that people struggle to understand or challenge. Take the provision of welfare benefits as an example: some governments are deploying algorithms in order to root out fraud. These harms are playing out every day, with powerful algorithmic technology being used to mediate our relationships between one another and between ourselves and our institutions. As AI becomes increasingly capable, and speculative fears about far-future existential risks gather mainstream attention, we need to work urgently to understand, prevent and remedy present-day harms. ![]() The worst-case scenario is that we fail to disrupt the status quo, in which very powerful companies develop and deploy AI in invisible and obscure ways. ‘The harms already being caused by AI are their own type of catastrophe’ So, any scenario has to come with the caveat that, most likely, all the scenarios we can imagine are going to be wrong. If you had asked them: “What’s the scenario in which humans are going to drive your species extinct?” what would they think? They would never have guessed that some people thought their sex life would improve if they ate ground-up rhino horn, even though this was debunked in medical literature. ![]() Take, for example, the west African black rhinoceros, one recent species that we drove to extinction. The tricky thing is, the species that is going to be wiped out often has no idea why or how. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. It has happened many times before that species were wiped out by others that were smarter. ‘If we become the less intelligent species, we should expect to be wiped out’ ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |