Is AI Supposed To Help Us Or Replace Us?
Who asked for all these AI bots, apps, APIs, etc... to be developed in the first place? All I can see from my side are:
- College graduates are in trouble of landing jobs, because entry-level stuff they are supposed to work on, can now be offloaded to AIs.
- Senior level employees on the other hand, are now expected to learn how to use AI, so that they can offload menial tasks to an AI, and work on other stuff. So instead of decreasing the amount of work they have, it actually makes management think they now have more time to work on something else, thereby increasing their workload.
- AIs that feed off large datasets are vulnerable to bad data getting into the system.
- In a similar vein, there is also the chance that people's PII data or other sensitive data can make it into an AI's dataset.
- With the advent of AIs that can generate beautiful images and artwork, the real artists with the skills to create beautiful art can now be relegated to the sidelines. To add insult to injury, it is entirely possible that their art was part of the dataset that the AI was working off. So not only are their jobs in jeopardy, their artworks are being stolen too, “remixed” into a different image.
- Musicians or actors don't need to be alive for their voice or image to be used in new media. I once heard an AI produced cover, of a popular song, from a popular rock vocalist who has already passed away. Technologically amazing, yes? But should we be doing this kind of stuff, no!
- In the previous US election, we dealt with fake news. I like to think we are over that now. But hold your horses, because in this coming election, you have to deal with AI generated news, and it will be even harder to tell if its fake or not. FML.
- There's probably more that I missed. But is the list above, taken together, not insanity already?
From my admittedly narrow perspective, the only field I see where AI can be of help, is in the medical field and maybe the socio-economic field. If it doesn't replace people's jobs and still improves the lives of everyone, then that is a good outcome.
But if it does the opposite. If it takes away jobs, while making corporations rich, then we need to ask ourselves: Is the net gain/benefits we get from using AI, a worthwhile trade over a world where services are rendered by real human beings? You know, people like you and me? I think not.