The Great Gold Rush of Artificial Intelligence
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2023-03-01
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The Great Gold Rush of Artificial Intelligence
by Ken Homer
Recently, I posted an article to the OGM list about the majority of the public lacking trust in AI. I posed the question of: Will AI be a net positive for humanity? Marshall Kirkpatrick replied with the question of: Where does capitalism stand in this question? Thanks Marshall! A most excellent question that I’ll try to answer here.
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IMO, capitalism bears a substantial burden for the lack of trust that people have about AI. From the standpoint of capitalism, AI represents the latest Gold Rush. Because the profit motive is such a driving force behind AI there are a host of ethical questions that get shunted aside when they should be thoughtfully engaged by the stakeholders who will be affected by AI’s deployment. Decisions made by those who see AI as another Gold Rush are suspect and deeply concerning to me.
Also concerning is the fact that the people who are programming AIs are, for the most part, university educated, predominantly male – though that is changing, with little life experience outside of school and the tech sector in which they’re employed, so they are in a bubble that does not accurately reflect the larger world. Because they majored in and performed well at the best STEM schools, most of these people tend to lack a robust and well-rounded understanding of ecology, sociology, history, psychology, biology, hydrology, climate, literature, the arts and humanities, and numerous other fields of knowledge which ought to be informing the minds of those whose work is developing AI. It’s alarming that these fields are not represented when important design conversations are taking place. Consider the numerous reports showing that facial recognition software is biased against Black and Brown faces and the fact that it has been banned from use by several large police forces, but is still widely used by others even though it has a dismal record of accuracy.
I would love to be proven wrong on the following: It is my assertion that due to the enormously attractive Pile O’Money to be made in AI, that its trajectory will repeat many of the worst patterns of human behavior that have accompanied every Gold Rush in history. Except the AI Gold Rush has a greatly increased potential for the long-term scarring of land and people. Many people who live in northern California know that the Gold Rush miners used water canons to blast away entire mountainsides in their quest for gold, and their use of mercury in extracting gold from ore resulted in levels of mercury in San Francisco Bay and numerous lakes and streams that remain dangerous to this day.
When there's a Gold Rush mentality at play in the economy, considerations involving the domains of public health and impacts on the health and viability of our environment are replaced by the profit motive as the overriding concern. This means conversations held in the closed-door meetings among the select few whose hands are on the levers power are not concerned with the larger picture or the unintended consequences that will follow from their actions. I suspect the dominant focus of those conversations is “how quickly we can make a killing?” (Sorry, that should probably be: “How quickly can we recoup our ROI?”)
I am not anti-AI. I think it has amazing potential to be a net positive for humanity and the planet, but only if it’s intentionally designed to be a servant for good not an engine for profit. AI's development needs to involve qualified representatives from the fields mentioned above. We also need to bear in mind the shadow side of human behavior when Gold Rush mentalities warp collective thinking. This is especially true when we are dealing with great and powerful technologies like AI. An image of “The Great and Powerful Oz” flashed through my mind in writing that last sentence and, just as with Dorothy and her companions, we too, would do well to focus on who's behind the curtain (and who is missing that needs to be there) instead of being distracted by the images being shown to us.
Trigger warning: The next bit is going to be hard for people to read because it’s a graphic illustration of the ugly ways ordinary people act when a Gold Rush mentality prevails.
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Recently, I was looking for a list of birds that were hunted to extinction. Among them was the Great Auk. The Great Auk was a member of the Penguin family, whose feathers were prized for making pillows. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia that reminds us that there are always people among us who simply don’t care what kind of harm they produce as long as they are making money:
An account by Aaron Thomas of HMS Boston from 1794 described how the bird had been slaughtered systematically until then:If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize. While you abide on this island you are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties for you not only skin them Alive, but you burn them Alive also to cook their Bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodies being oily soon produce a Flame; there is no wood on the island.What concerns me about the rush to develop various forms of AI is that the kind of callousness illustrated above is now no longer simply a matter of a few self-serving individuals but has become the raison d’être of most large corporations.
It seems likely that many of those who are in positions to fund and steer the growth and development of AI (and who will reap the early financial benefits) will treat it as another Gold Rush or Great Auk; get it out there in any form as fast as possible to make as much money as possible and ignore/externalize any damage it causes.
Bottom line for me: AI is not to be trusted until it proves itself to be truly intelligent by acting in the best interests of increasing our chances for surviving and thriving in a world that has been greatly diminished by the unintended consequences of capitalism with its boom and bust/Gold Rush/winner-take-all mentalities. I know that my opinion is unlikely to have much impact on the billions of dollars being invested in getting the next AI killer app out there. But we may want to think carefully about the “killer” part of that AI app and who might end up dead.
Related:
- Ken Homer (author)
- 2023 (year)
- Topics: AI and Technology, Health and Wellbeing, Tools and Platforms