Why you should really worry about AI
Alarmists tell us the revolution in mobile computing, robotics, autonomous-drive vehicles and the like threaten about half of the jobs in advanced industrial societies, and could relegate the masses to waiting on tables and drive unconscionable inequality. However, the bigger threat could be the herding of human behavior by big data and marketing analytics.
The innovations are driven by artificial intelligence. This won’t eliminate jobs as much as change the skill requirements for existing positions and greatly increase the productivity of workers in those roles.
Brick-and-mortar stores are shuttering but retail employment is not contracting. It is shifting to warehouses, delivery trucks and software developers, who write logistical programs to manage the delivery networks of FedEx and its competitors.
For the first time since the 1960s workers, not jobs, are scarce and businesses are investing heavily to train up low-skilled employees into coding, systems maintenance and other promising careers.
Washington policy makers are accustomed to thinking about boosting potential growth — and stimulating it with tax cuts and cheap money — in terms of buildings, equipment, software, and R&D.
AI’s real threat is to our independent wills and freedom to behave in ways contrary to “the average” or an “ideal” as defined by the Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue values.
Facebook is seeking access to our credit-card and banking transactions, and Google permits app developers to track us on the web and read the contents of emails — what better way to get a window on personal sentiments, strengths and weaknesses.
Prospective employers increasingly use artificial intelligence programs to sort resumes, track web activity and evaluate questionnaire responses. And now, robot avatars interview job candidates and evaluate their body language, tone of voice and facial expressions.
Businesses are assigning customer scores based on where they live, financial data and banking behavior, web surfing interests and the like. In turn, those determine, for example, whose calls are answered immediately or put on hold for 10 minutes by credit-card companies and customer-service representatives and who gets an airline seat upgrade.
AI programs that can write their own algorithms and access the emails of their masters and targets could easily start imposing value systems of their own design — perhaps those of the left-leaning Silicone Valley or the greed-driven preferences of drug manufacturers who buy up patents and quadruple prices. They could impose those through all kinds of computer-screening tasks for job applications, college admissions and even the selection of junior criminal-justice lawyers and court clerks.
How would you like a computer program grading your life to determine if your child and family would be a good fit for a sought-after kindergarten spot or co-op apartment?
Humans have an infinite capacity to cope, but in such processes all this could condemn us to responding to the carrots and sticks of a tyrannical norm. Ever conscious that our typed words and actions could condemn us, these technologies could make Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” the post-deity world’s new “Book of Revelations.” Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.