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Artificial Intelligence: GuideRails Needed in a Quest to Improve the World
In 2017, the ‘Democracy Index’ published by the Economist demoted the level of democracy in the US from ‘full democracy’ to ‘flawed democracy’. Since then, we haven’t regained our standing. How can we improve? Is technology part of a solution? Could AI help?
Artificial Intelligence uses data to make decisions, and often the decisions are amazingly good. But there is a debate and worry about what the limits are for using AI, if any, and what types of things AI should be able to decide.
What if the judges in the courtrooms of our world were algorithms? Would we have more faith that justice would be issued fairly and consistently? What if we delegated policy decisions to algorithms? Does it make sense to consult with AI on questions of economics and foreign policy? Or what about using AI to help balance priorities in determining how to spend and utilize government budgets? Would decisions be more balanced and unbiased? Would the world be better?
AI definitely has the potential to do a lot of good if used wisely. But there is also a lot that can go wrong with relying on technology, and a lot of bad things have already happened.
Alexander Vindman, retired US army colonel and lead author, in an article for the Diplomat, wrote that “given the chilling implications of AI misuse, the tech industry is skeptical of government-led programs. But the industry has erred as well; social media technology and digital disruption have deformed and undermined democracy. Leaving AI technology free to develop absent guardrails also presents dangers. In a no-holds-barred technological arms race with China, the United States may backslide into that which it hopes to contain. Ethics must be a central concern in the development of AI.”
HMI of the Australian National University website says that “democracy is a vessel that can be filled with many things: democracies must respect fundamental human rights, cultural group rights, indigenous land claims, and much more. The process of selecting the values that we design into AI systems should be just the same as our process for resolving other evaluative conflicts—we need to adapt democratic institutions to play this role, as we must adapt them continuously for all social and technological changes, but democracy should be our lode star.”
Interesting