Following last week's Congressional hearings on AI, we're reflecting on the question: what kind of world do we want to live in, and how can we use emerging technology (AI and otherwise) to help get us there? It bears recalling: technology is only a runaway force if we allow it to be.
Six Ways that AI Could Change Politics | MIT Technology Review
These articles raise the prospect of an AI-created political party (with human candidates), AI-drafted legislation, and AI-executed political advocacy or lobbying. Human judgment is fallible and our government systems are imperfect – but at what point does integration of AI technocracy cease to be a democracy?
Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, offers some great insights in this podcast interview. This comment, in particular, resonated with us: "We'll set up an economy that is efficient, maybe highly productive but forgets that the point of the economy is for humans – and not the other way around … AI takes those dynamics … and could make them worse." This also hits home: "[I fear] the entire system starts to view humans as secondary, as opposed to primary."
There are plenty of ways to use AI as an unmitigated good: accelerated drug development/medical research is one of those. DeepMind's model's success at protein folding, in 2020, illustrates those possibilities.
A series of studies were released this week that attempt to measure the impact of social media algorithms on users' political attitudes. The results were complicated, surprising and challenge the general thinking that algorithms are driving political division in the ways we assume.
This article explores where immigrants are particularly vulnerable to disinformation – and ways in which that vulnerability was exploited in recent elections, using disinformation as a tool for voter suppression.