Back to: Artifical Intelligence
The development and uptake of AI has been rapid and it is currently being used in some exciting and life-changing ways, however it does come with some ethical and employment concerns. The impact it will have on our everyday lives and jobs should be considered. Some examples are:
Self-driving cars
One concern with self-driving cars is trying to control the decisions the cars will make in a deadly situation. If the car is about to crash into a pedestrian, should the AI protect the victim or the driver? This is a form of the philosophical problem, the trolley dilemma.
When this dilemma is applied to self-driving cars, programmers must make a similar moral decision to determine what the outcome of a potential crash should be when developing AI.
Amazon jobs AI
Amazon created an AI to help narrow down applications for jobs they had advertised. The AI was developed to take hundreds of resumes and reduce it down to the top 5 for recruiters to interview. However, before being fully implemented and after various test runs, the AI was found to have a gender bias towards males due to the data it was using: the last 10 years of successful hires. Since there was a male bias in the technology industry the AI was unfairly undervaluing women, and any applicants who mentioned women in their resume.
The AI simply scanned the data it was given for patterns and similarities and applied the lessons learnt to its task, however it lacked the nuance or rules for not valuing individuals based on their gender. Read more: Insight – Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women (Reuters, 11 October 2018).
Unemployment – automatic tellers, chatbots etc
AI being able to undertake various tasks has the potential to replace a human completing those same tasks. This creates uncertainty in some industries around their future.
The boss of Amazon has told white collar staff at the e-commerce company their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence in the next few years.
Andrew Jassy told employees that AI agents – tools that carry out tasks autonomously – and generative AI systems such as chatbots would require fewer employees in certain areas.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said in a memo to staff. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
Jassy said in the near future there would be billions of AI agents working across companies and in people’s daily lives.
“There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field. There will also be agents that routinely do things for you outside of work, from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks. Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast,” he said.
Image generator
Nvidia has produced a generative adversarial network (GAN) that generates entirely new images that appear real. To see this in action go to thispersondoesnotexist.com, every time you refresh the page you will be greeted with a brand new image produced by the generator.
Google Lens
Google Lens is an image recognition app for Android devices that uses your smartphone camera and deep machine learning to detect an object and understand what it is and offer suggestions. It can be used for actions such as shopping, translating text and searching.