http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/12/10/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-humans/
“Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will”
Artificial intelligence(AI)’s role in human society is more clear today than it was one to three generations ago, hallmarked by the pop-culture of B-studio science fiction movies discoverable during weekend Blockbuster store deals. If the previous statement did not make sense, perhaps “big corpa” succeeded with their mechanical efforts to dumb down our American consumers and markets because “ignorant shoppers are profitable shoppers.” Common themes such as “big corpa” blended utopia and dystopia together ranging from questionable happiness of human beings when treated as farm livestock, where men fight to be the best and women have sex for the strongest men’s sperm, to boredom survival in societies where everything is perfect so no human being has any complaint, where boredom ultimately leads to humanity’s own self-destruction. Backtracking to the 1900s when machines were not as central compared to the 1950s, science fiction horror then was more philosophical and questioned the essence of humanity to create moral compasses and to better draw a line from horrors of war from science. A hundred years from now, would we regret what we have done or not done now? Between a genius defined by self and a genius defined by others, who is more of a genius? Should financiers bear the same guilt as criminals as the lives they ruin? These questions defined the moral compass and decisions of many scientists, inventors, and researchers through the World Wars, Cold War, and, albeit significantly fewer, even now.
Today, too many decision makers guiding the future of our human race grossly lack our moral compasses and utopia-dystopia perspectives we share since the past century. Purposeful, we can transform research and development as cogs in our war machines. And thoughtful, we can filter in and share innovation at the struggles and despairs of those not willing to fuel our war machines. This is not entirely a dystopia because average, common people are able to choose between intellectual paragon and social popularity. What about people with debilitating disabilities and histories? If we learned anything about human nature from the modern convenience of our Internet, it is that technology continues to surprise new, unintended knowledge. Wolf or hyena-type community packs that hound misfortunate people in communities have reach to hound misfortunate people anywhere in our world. For business-operated platform hosts, these packs provide lucrative advertising, click, and data revenues and every scandal or incident further fuels such business. As a businessperson, it is to such company’s best interests to help guide these packs to cause a viral incident that will generate more money for the company. In research and development, these technologies are in the hands of such businesspeople who tend to cease and desist after receiving a court order, and then find the next money-making opportunity. With more and more money in these peoples’ hands, we face increasing uncertainty in the preservation of humanity’s moral compasses and future-sightedness.
Writing as a 29 year old American male struggling to find a home and seeking to establish a big family, I commonly consider what directions our human race will face in thirty years. As we work with more and more military partnerships due to the technological insufficiency of our federal, state, and local governments and civic inappropriateness of corporation and business security and defense functions(clearly evident from US defense spending increases from $300 million in 2000 to $717 billion in 2019), I can’t help but wonder our nation returning to our militaristic estates of the 1700s. As much as non-Americans would like to believe in incompetence, I feel chills every time I envision the possibilities of how and whether our nation will secure the Americas to complete engineers’ wet-dreams of two super-continental American fortresses. Alternatively, perhaps our military has already been taken over by artificially intelligent machines and we are simply following a GDP model. I do not know. Whether or not and under what conditions it would be worthwhile to have children in a dystopia also gravely concerns me.
At least the Pew Research Center summarizes some suggested solutions to AI and the future of America that I re-emphasize here.
(1) “Global good is No. 1:Improve human collaboration across borders and stakeholder groups. Digital cooperation to serve humanity's best interests is the top priority. Ways must be found for people around the world to come to common understandings and agreements - to join forces to facilitate the innovation of widely accepted approaches aimed at tackling wicked problems and maintaining control over complex human-digital networks.”
(2) “Value-based system:Develop policies to assure AI will be directed at ‘humanness’ and common good. Adopt a 'moonshot mentality' to build inclusive, decentralized intelligent digital networks 'imbued with empathy' that help humans aggressively ensure that technology meets social and ethical responsibilities. Some new level of regulatory and certification process will be necessary.”
(3) “Prioritize people:Alter economic and political systems to better help humans ‘race with the robots.’ Reorganize economic and political systems toward the goal of expanding humans' capacities and capabilities in order to heighten human/AI collaboration and staunch trends that would compromise human relevance in the face of programmed intelligence.”
Maybe the majority of millennial parents are not wrong in “helicoptering” their children into their careers to the extent of our nation neglecting our at-risk youth, broken families, and orphans and treating us like trash and losers blaming how we didn’t study hard enough to graduate from a good school. According to some opinions, maybe it is about politics and, after twenty years, it will finally be the most vulnerable of our American nation’s turn to receive assistance to establish a living for ourselves. But what we clearly can observe today are the models for our AI frameworks and algorithms in the future.
We need some way to influence decision makers to develop their own moral compasses, or find some way to usurp their utopias on our dystopia.