“Artificial intelligence and machine learning, as a dominant discipline within AI, is an amazing tool. In and of itself, it’s not good or bad. It’s not a magic solution. It isn’t the core of the problems in the world.”
Vivienne Ming, executive chair and co-founder, Socos Labs
In this multi-part series, I will be discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its effect on humanity and our future. A lot has already been written about AI and its effects, especially with recently released tools like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. However, much of what has been posted, liked, upvoted, and recycled on the internet involves fear and clickbait. In part 1 of this series, I will talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of our AI future.
The Good
There are many things that AI and the computers they are built on can do better than humans. Number crunching, holding information, automation, and pattern recognition. As the computers we build become faster and faster, the AI we build on top of them becomes smarter and smarter. While there is much to be afraid of, there is a lot to be optimistic about as well. For example, let’s talk about AI in healthcare and medicine. In 2022, my wife was experiencing lower back pain that would not go away. It continued to the point that she could not lay in bed and would be curled up on the floor in extreme pain. After a couple of trips to the emergency room and an MRI scan, the hospital found that a spinal disk had bulged out and was compressing her spinal cord. This type of injury is called Cauda equina and it is an emergency medical situation. The closest hospital to us is small but it does serve a retirement community that requires a lot of back-related surgeries. Because of this, the hospital had recently hired a new surgeon and bought a new AI-powered, robotic arm for back surgeries called Excelsius GPS. The arm was designed to assist doctors during surgeries by improving placement (cuts), reducing the need for radiation imaging, and decreasing operating time. Without that AI-assisted machine and her surgeon, she would have had to be flown to larger hospital hours away. After the surgery, the surgeon stated that if she had been airlifted she would most likely have been paralyzed from the waist down.
Not only can AI help assist doctors in surgery but it can also help in one of the hardest parts of medicine, diagnosing a patient. How many times have you gone to a doctor’s office with an aliment and it takes multiple blood tests or imagining to figure out what your aliment is? In 2018 an AI called Biomind beat a team of doctors in Beijing in diagnosing brain tumors and hematoma expansion. It was able to look at brain scans and diagnose correctly 87% of the time vs the human doctors who were only able to diagnose 66% correctly. In 2020, a state-of-the-art associative AI was pitted against 44 doctors in a test set of 1671 real medical cases. The AI was able to diagnose 77.26% correctly while the doctors were only able to diagnose 71.40%. Imagine a world where you can type in your symptoms and get a reasonable diagnosis within minutes. Or how about an implant that can monitor your body and alert you instantly to a medical emergency or a growing tumor?
What about AI in productivity and manufacturing? A company I worked for wanted me to head out to their warehouse and map out and hang wireless access points. They wanted this because they were setting up an AI-assisted warehouse system to pick, pack, and ship products. The goal is that it would increase product tracking and product movement from their warehouse to the customer. Hell, the access points we went with had AI built into the software to help with dropouts and signal optimization. In the service industry, tools like ChatGPT can handle routine customer support requests, freeing up employees to handle more complex tasks. Developers and software engineers can speed up coding by having AI write the mundane structures of the code while they handle the more complex algorithms. Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google are using AI to help users write emails and generate marketing content.
One of the most valuable finite resources in the world is time. The time we have on this earth is finite (at least for now) and AI has many benefits in assisting our lives and giving us back time. That being said AI could certainly come to the point that it gives people too much time by taking over entire industries and jobs. This leads us to…
The Bad
Right now we live in an AI-assistive world. I use it for spell-checking and article flow. I use it to check my code and format it correctly. I use it for image generation and even SEO. So what happens when AI assistive becomes AI controlling? Let’s start with the fat elephant in the room which is Chatgpt created by OpenAi. ChatGPT is a:
.. a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
OpenAi
If you haven’t used it I would highly suggest going over and having a conversation with it. I myself have used it countless times since its release to test its limits and to assist me in tasks. That being said companies are already replacing customer support roles with ChatGPT. As time goes on here are some more jobs that could very easily be replaced in the near future:
- Customer Service Roles
- Article Writers
- Some Construction Work
- Coders/programming
- Data analyst
- Content Creators
- Copywriter
- Editors
- Gettys Entire Business (Stable Diffusion)
- Artists
- Musicians
- Financial Analysts
- Paralegals
- Legal assistants
- Assistants
- Personal Financial Advisors
- Day Trading
- Teaching
This list isn’t exhausting but it does paint a rather scary picture. I have no timeline on when any of this could take place but it will happen. Before refrigeration, there used to be a profession of ice cutters who would cut ice and deliver it to storage houses. When refrigeration was invented I am sure the outcry was vocal and loud. Jobs will certainly be created to manage and design AI but it won’t happen overnight and it’s hard to tell if it will create more than it destroys.
What about AI creating inequality and discrimination? AI isn’t free. It requires powerful hardware and software to make it work. While Stable Diffusion which can generate text to image and ChatGPT are free, ChatGPT is already selling a paid service. Almost every major tech company is planning to offer AI to the masses, most will have a paid service of some sort that will offer more features and speed. How does someone with little means compete with someone who can afford it and is assisted by AI?
AI can also be discriminatory. Most machine learning is trained on data: AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. If the training data is biased or incomplete, the AI model will make biased predictions. For example, if an AI model is trained on historical data that includes discriminatory patterns, the model may perpetuate these biases by making unfair decisions. AI can also be inherently biased, even if the training data is unbiased. This is because the algorithms are designed by humans who may unconsciously embed their own biases into the algorithms. For example, an AI algorithm designed to screen job applications may discriminate against certain groups of people if the algorithm is designed to favor certain educational backgrounds or work experiences that historically disadvantaged these groups. AI is only as good as the data it was created on and the people who created it.
I debated putting this last part in the ugly category because I already see it happening in our day-to-day lives. AI is becoming a crutch and it can certainly lead to our loss of certain human skills in the future. Most of us would struggle to get somewhere new without GPS and our favorite map apps. When I cook I constantly ask Alexa to set cooking timers for me. We use it without knowing when we are searching for information and troubleshooting problems. If you ever have some free time and like reading science fiction then I suggest you read The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. In the story, humanity is at its apex in all things. The Empire spans the galaxy and has been stable for 12,000 years. However, the Empire and its citizens rely on technology to the point that the foundation of knowledge that got them there is lost. At one point in the story, a colony makes a deal with four more powerful nations because they understand nuclear power and the other nations do not.
AI could become a crutch to the point that we lose foundational knowledge. For example, let’s say I am writing a program that will pull IPv4 addresses out of a random list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I get stuck and so I ask ChatGPT to write me a regex command for IPv4. In seconds it supplies me with the code and I am on my way. Is that helpful? Yes. Do I understand the code it gave me? No. It is one thing to ask a question and something else entirely to understand the answer. Even with job displacement, economic and social inequality, discrimination, and loss of human skills, there are still things AI can do that are even worse. This leads us to…
The Bad
With great power comes great responsibility.
Stan Lee – The Amazing Spiderman
Like almost anything AI can be abused. It can be used to deceive you, hurt you, and even one day kill you. AI is a tool and in the wrong hands, a tool can just as easily become a weapon. I work as a security engineer and every day I have to stay on top of new threat intelligence. Maybe a piece of software or hardware has a flaw that needs to be patched or a hostile actor is sending our employees phishing emails to steal their credentials. It’s a never-ending game of wack-a-mole. So it disappointed me to hear that people with little to no coding experience were writing ransomware using AI. These people were having chatGPT write ransomware that if run on a user’s machine will look for specific files and encrypt them for extortion. Now, imagine someone with actual experience using the tool.
Speaking of extortion and blackmail what about AI image generation? A tool that has been in the news a lot lately, Stable Diffusion, can take text and generate an image. It requires no skills other than typing out what you want in as much detail as possible. You can also upload an image and have it changed for you. Imagine, a teenager is mad that a girl rejected him so he goes on Instagram and downloads an image of her. He downloads an edited version of Stable Diffusion that allows adult content to be generated and removes her clothes. He then sends it to all his friends.
It’s not just images that AI can generate but voice and video as well. A couple in Canada lost $21,000 after a scammer called them using their son’s voice. So much of our data is out on the internet. It doesn’t take much for a scammer to piece enough together to potentially ruin your life. Just like in the real world where one tool is created and another one is created to counter it, you cannot put this genie back in its box. It will be a constant game of wack-a-mole to defend against these scams and malware.
War on our planet will also be affected by AI. Already, militaries have introduced AI-powered wingmen that will fly next to fighter aircraft. These aircraft fly autonomously and are used to scout the battlefield and absorb enemy fire. Some companies are using AI-powered robot dogs to patrol outer fences and even for police work. These robots don’t have feelings and if armed won’t second-guess decisions. AI in the military world is a zero-sum game. They can’t be reasoned with and will only follow their cold hard logic in battle. We aren’t anywhere near a Skynet-style takeover or even terminator but AI does change the battlefield in more ways than one.
Conclusion
AI cannot be classified as simply good, bad, or ugly. Rather, it is a complex issue that requires careful consideration and management to ensure that AI is used in a way that maximizes its benefits while minimizing its potential negative consequences. Right now, we have a chance to figure out the best way to bring AI’s good to the world without the bad and the ugly immensely hurting us in the process. Personally, I hope that it will bring about an evolution in humanity and not bias revolution that hurts more than it heals. Time will tell.