Dispatch: AI might not take your job; Ethical questions raised; Could a machine be conscious?
We start the new year with many AI developments that are impacting daily life
Hello Friends,
Well this new year is showing no signs of slowing down for AI developments! And by that I don’t been some obscure tech upgrades, I mean AI is really starting to impact peoples daily lives, and quite soon I imagine your life too.
This week the most interesting themes in AI news I’m seeing are:
AI might not take your job: It has been a worry that AI might replace many jobs, the most recent news indicates this might not be so severe
Ethical questions raised: As we start to use AI in our daily lives, this is raising more questions about what is right, and even about who we are
Could a machine be conscious: While we start to use AI more, does it matter if AI becomes conscious or not? What would it mean if it did?
Have a great week!
Best wishes,
Pranath
My latest articles
AI Girlfriends: The Convenient Scapegoat for Our Failing Relationships
Not sci-fi anymore, the most popular GPT’s in OpenAI’s GPT store are AI Girlfriends. While most articles on this are telling us how bad this is, I feel the more interesting question is why? Why are people using these AI Girlfriends? What might this say about us as humans and the state of human relationships?
How China is Supporting AI & Creative Freedom Better Than the West
Those who live in the West believe they are the most free societies - but is this always true? I’ve looked at how the West and China are responding to AI and creative freedoms and was surprised to discover China seems to be protecting certain AI freedoms better than the West.
The Truth About AI-Driven Cars: They Are Not the Enemy — We Are
Most of the media coverage of AI driven cars is very negative, seeing them as a threat - killer machines on the road. But do these media narratives have any substance under scrutiny? How safe is AI? And how safe are humans?
Notable other AI news
AI might not take our jobs - yet
Two key articles this week seem to throw some doubt if AI will take as many jobs as some might have feared, or not soon anyway.
Many experts and analysts have predicted that AI may replace many jobs in the next 20 years, and these include people with significant experience leading AI companies such as Kai-Fu Lee former head of Google china who said:
Basically chauffeurs, truck drivers anyone who does driving for a living their jobs will be disrupted more in the 15 to 20 year time frame and many jobs that seem a little bit complex, chef, waiter, a lot of things will become automated we'll have automated stores, automated restaurants, and all together in 15 years, that's going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.
Mustafa Suleyman, former co-founder of AI startup Deepmind has also said:
I think in the long-term — over many decades — we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor-replacing tools
Yet this week two reports indicated that this might not be so severe, or at least not yet:
AI is too expensive to steal some jobs — for now, MIT study finds: This study found that actually AI is still more expensive and difficult to integrate into businesses, but notes this may be more of a short term problem
Reports of AI ending human labour may be greatly exaggerated: A recent report by the European central bank has also highlighted there is no clear evidence yet in European countries that AI is causing significant unemployment
Could a machine be conscious?
Some might say this doesn’t matter, but does it?
This has been made more tricky because of our own limited understanding of consciousness and out difficulty in understanding it scientifically.
We can also recall other debates about animal consciousness, where historically we have moved from a position of believing only humans are conscious to most recently where scientists increasingly believe other animals might be conscious.
Two recent articles have done more thinking on this:
RETHINKING CONSCIOUSNESS – THE ETHICAL DEBATE SURROUNDING AI AND ANIMALS: This links the debates on animal consciousness to those on AI, and the ethical implications for both, for example how should we treat them if they are conscious?
Can an AI System Be Sentient? Ask a Philosopher: Andrew Ng former head of Google AI wrote a piece on this earlier this week. He makes many observations on this including the fact that we currently have no way to test if a machine is sentient, so if one of our current AI’s is conscious - we might not even realise it.
But what’s your perspective on the issues raised this week?
I’d love to know what you think whatever that is, let me know in the comments and let’s continue this important discussion about how AI is impacting society.