Creeped out
Even if you don’t like creepy movies, you probably know about toy doll Chucky, who comes to life to wreak havoc on the lives of those who come in contact with it.
According to The Dallas Morning News, artificial intelligence will advance from toy to tool in 2024. At first blush, that statement may send chills up your spine.
Should it?
AI has defects in the form of what are known as “hallucinations.” We point to a case in New York where a lawyer used AI to write a legal brief that started with a fairly accurate description of a case, but turned it into complete nonsense. Worse yet, the attorney’s AI helper hallucinated (or fabricated) legal precedents that were never set as a way to bolster his case. The judge wasn’t happy when this situation came to light.
Like many tools, this one can be used for good or bad. Around 94 percent of business leaders (!) say AI is critical to success in the next five years, according to a Deloitte report.
The technology has implications in health care, where it could use existing patient data to predict how a disease will progress. In the public services sector, machine learning algorithms could evaluate housing or food security risks. People speaking different languages could have their words translated to a different language in their own voice in real time.
“Next year we will see, across every sector, in almost every enterprise, some kind of an AI assistant at the employee level, whether it’s something as simple as drafting an email or putting together the first draft of a PowerPoint,” said Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Deloitte AI Institute.
The Morning News says the technology that was once restricted to computer labs is “more democratized than ever.”
And speaking of democracy, that’s where AI may scare some the most. Democracy depends on a common agreement on what is and what is not truth.
Unbridled, this new AI technology has the potential to disrupt elections, make candidates appear to say/do awful things, and who knows what else. Homo faber, man the toolmaker, will need to keep an eye on his toolbox. It’s one thing to use machinery, another to be used by it.
Because this technology has such disruptive potential, many would rather it just go away rather than try to build systems that bring out its best.
Who knows, maybe AI itself can provide some of the answers on how it should be regulated.
It’s always better to arrive at the correct answer than the quick answer, even if it takes more time. But the lessons of the past few years seem to point in this direction: There isn’t going to be more time. This stuff will come fast, and to distinguish right from wrong, fact from fiction, real from AI, we’ll all have to use the tool that has proven again and again to be the best one handed down by the Man Upstairs:
The human brain.