The Age of AI

 

Given the rapid growth of technology over the past couple decades, the advancements of AI (artificial intelligence) can be seen running equally adjacent; with both working in harmony to present the “what if’s” or possibilities of the future. In previous videos we’ve watched in class, we’ve seen creations such as personalized robots, realistic-feeling prosthetics, and even robotic devices expressing emotion. We’ve also seen it in normalized technology in society, through facial recognition, and search/recommendation algorithms. However in this Frontline documentary titled “In the Age of AI,” we get a deeper look into these advancements and what they can mean for ourselves, our future, and our safety. 

In the documentary, we saw things like the technological advancements in China, and how newfound AI can affect employment; but the one thing I wanted to discuss was the 24 year old entrepreneur/inventor of the self-driving, very large storage trucks. I had many thoughts on this initially, but the first thing that came to mind was safety. To set the record straight, I am not opposed to the idea of self-driving cars; I think Tesla’s are one of the greatest inventions of this generation. However, a Tesla is a small, average sized moving box, in which IF an error was to be made during the self driving feature, it would only harm/hurt those in the car, and occasionally a car or two surrounding them, given the circumstances. With this Mac truck sized automobile, if it even glitches ONCE, in the slightest way, we are talking mass casualties car pile-ups. We have seen what kind of damage human error inside one of those trucks can do, and if you allow a computer (which lacks both reflexes and human error) to drive a truck like that, I can only imagine chaos will ensue. Not to mention, I myself would be terrified to drive near a truck like that, as those big trucks with real people driving on the highways tend to scare me regardless. This is the area of AI in which I believe they are trying to fix something that is not broken, and they are just playing around with technology for the sake of it, because they can, not should. 

Additionally, these new technologies are essentially bringing us back to the struggles once faced during the first wave of industrialism, with almost a 50% decrease in employment/affecting jobs. AI is creating this extremely imbalanced economy, in which middle class citizens won’t exist anymore, you’re either rich for inventing or poor because your job got taken by a robot. Like anything, there needs to be a line drawn, and a perfect balance. Personally, I do not see the need for many AI inventions. This is of course not without dissent, as technology and some AI advancements have been beneficial and have attempted to make “disabled” aspects of our lives easier. For example, things that we have talked about in class such as prosthetics for musicians and athletes, or having the ability to detect certain diseases, are the things I think AI should be solely used for, and are some of the only things that do more good than bad. We should be trying to make our current situations better, not reinventing the way things work and essentially leaving the human race to be extinct. With AI, we are pushing ourselves (humans) further and further out of the big picture of the world.