Artificial Intelligence Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be
by John Lawrence, November 11, 2019
Supposedly the next big thing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already fueling a heady competition between the US and China. The difference between AI and a computer program is that AI can learn from its mistakes and go on to not make them again. This is what is driving the development of self driving cars. If a self driving car with AI makes a mistake and kills someone, it will never make that same mistake again having learned from the experience just as a human might. Already Google has made an AI version of Go. Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia.
Recently an AI version of Go called AlphaGo developed by Google beat the world champion who is considered in the same famous light as a world master of chess might be. Like in the self driving car Google's Go will learn from its mistakes never making the same one twice. It is also creatively thinking of moves even Go masters have never considered. But the self driving car is a different matter. It cannot afford to learn from the mistake while killing another human. And self driving cars are not ready for human consumption. Already two people have been killed by them, one with an Uber test model and the other with a Tesla on Autopilot. Elon Musk discussed the autopilot system publicly in 2013, noting "Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars."
The first publicized fatal accident involving a Tesla engaged in Autopilot mode took place in Williston, Florida, on May 7, 2016. The driver was killed in a crash with an 18-wheel tractor-trailer. The big rig was making a left turn at an uncontrolled intersection across a four lane highway, and Autopilot failed to notice it. Neither did the driver who was watchng a movie. According to Tesla, "neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied." The car attempted to drive full speed under the trailer, "with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S." Tesla also stated that this was Tesla’s first known Autopilot-related death in over 130 million miles driven by its customers while Autopilot was activated. According to Tesla there is a fatality every 94 million miles among all type of vehicles in the U.S.
So self driving cars and trucks will be justified on statistical grounds that they are statistically safer than human driven cars and trucks. The AI will learn from those statistical errors driving down the percentage of self driven cars involved in accidents. This, I suppose, is all well and good, but it means that a lot of truck drivers will lose their jobs, not to mention a lot of taxi and Uber drivers. AI will result in a lot of human beings losing jobs in all kinds of fields as AI and robots will have taken over even those manufacturing jobs they have not already taken over.
Some entrepreneurs will become billionaires while many more average people will be forced into homelessness having lost their jobs. Technology literally is a job killer, yet both China and the US are going full speed ahead with AI. It's seen as the sine qua non of the next generation. AI and 5G will be integrated in such a way as to speed up all kinds of network and communications processes. Put simply, 5G speeds up the services that you may have on the cloud, an effect similar to being local to the service. AI gets to analyze the same data faster and can learn faster to be able to develop according to users’ needs.
So what does AI do to solve the problem of global warming? Not much. It's all about the technological takeover of everyday life in such a way that it will probably eliminate your job. The economic divide will become more precipitous. A few billionaires will possess most of the world's wealth. What will AI do for the people living in poverty and those that are homeless. It will probably makes those problems worse.
In China roughly 600 million people were taken out of extreme poverty between 1981 and 2008. That is a remarkable achievement. In America by contrast the number of people experiencing homelessness in unsheltered locations increased for a second straight year by 9% between 2016 and 2017 according to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. This issue is partly caused by a lack of affordable housing, by job loss and/or a medical catastrophe.
AI and 5G represent people living in a techie fairyland both in the US and China. China will use AI to accumulate a dossier on every single living Chinese. Face recognition technology will track everyone in public so that a numerical score can be given to each individual which will represent their value to society. Cameras are ubiquitous. While I favor cameras being used to solve crimes in the US, giving everyone a social score seems ridiculous. There were no cameras at a Church's chicken restaurant in Chula Vista a few days ago which meant that the man who shot 3 people killing one got away without being detected. Although I resent the extent to which China tracks each individual which AI will make possible, every American has a credit score which makes it impossible to buy a car, rent an apartment or buy a house without a credit check so data is kept on each American as well as each Chinese. Background checks on Americans can also reveal prison records and other data so the two countries aren't really all that different in their quests to keep tabs on all their citizens.
It will be interesting to see how the two consumer societies, China and the US, handle the lack of jobs brought about by AI. China is already exporting its workers to build infrastructure in other parts of the world in accordance with its Belt and Road initiative. The US solution is to let anyone without a job join the military. Sadly, it's China that's following the course of peaceful development in the world while the US takes the course of military domination of the world. What the world really needs is for both China and the US to put excess labor to work mitigating climate change, converting to renewable energy and bringing Africa and India out of poverty. But while China is creating friends and trading partners, the US is hell bent on military action and sanctions to get its way in the world. I wonder what Jesus would say.
