We are please to bring you an expert insight by Jamie Dobson, founder of Container Solutions and author of โVisionaries, Rebels and Machinesโ on how Artificial Intelligence may be problematic. However, more and more of us view AI as the greatest thing since sliced bread. But even sliced bread has its detractors (highly processed ingredients for starters), and there are plenty of folk far from keen to embrace AI…
As is the case with almost everything, there is a sweet spot between the extremes where most people will gravitate to, but getting there does require us to address various concerns. And for business owners and managers there are a few worries that need to be considered.
Amaraโs Law
Amaraโs Law states that the impact of technologies is overestimated in the short term but underestimated in the long term. Driverless cars, which have been coming out next year every year since 2016, is an example of overestimation.
Artificial neural networks, the key technology behind almost all AI systems youโve heard of, might be good at playing Breakout or predicting how proteins fold, but it cannot (yet) cope with the chaos of roads that, in my home village of Greenwich, were laid down by feet and hooves hundreds of years ago.
Amaraโs Law works because researchers and practitionersโsome driven by greed, others by fortune and others still by curiosityโfind uses for the technology or find ways to improve it.
For business managers, this is a worry for two reasons. On the one hand, if managers overestimate the readiness of a technology, then they tend to allocate too many resources to implementing it immediately at scale. Such quick ramp-ups are always followed by embarrassing climb downs. On the other hand, if managers underestimate a technology, like many did with the Cloud and are doing right now with Artificial Intelligence, then all of a sudden, they will find themselves playing catch up to their competitors.
A general-purpose technologyโs destiny lies in usersโ hands
A second reason to worry about why AI may be problematic is that general purpose systems, like the content of Pandoraโs box, cannot be put back once let out. In the hands of Tim Berners-Lee, the personal computer and the Internet became the web. In the hands of a failed physicist in a garage in Seattle, the web gave birth to Amazon.com. What will artificial neural networks become in the hands of a hacker?
Good players will strive to make the world a better place, but unfortunately there are also plenty of bad players who are either simply out for themselves and the rest of us be damned, or who are determined to the burn the entire house down and take all of us with it. And sometimes itโs not even that clear who the good and bad players are as it all depends on where you sit on certain issues.
The end of the world of work as we know it
Another concern is the dramatic and continued effects on the labour market. Strategy and management consultants McKinsey have predicted that by 2030 30% of all hours currently worked in the United States will be automated. Between now and then, 12 million workers will seek a different job because their current one will no longer exist. This will add pressure to the already high-pressure labour markets they are entering and thus hand further bargaining power to business owners.
The job apocalypse seems to be coming to pass. Announcements are made daily about governments opening up their data to private firms to train their artificial neural networks and of companies shedding their workforces and replacing them with AI โagentsโ.
If you work as a manager, you have a triple challenge: rearranging your team to work alongside AI agents, reassuring those left in your workforce (even if realistically there is nothing reassuring about what is happening), and doing so whilst the Damoclean Sword of Artificial Intelligence hangs over your head, suspended not by a horseโs hair but by the whims of a man in an office looking at a spreadsheet.
Reaping what we all sowed
In the early part of the 2010s, Cambridge Analytica illegally collected the personal data of millions of Facebook users. From that data, psychographicsโa portmanteau of psychology and demographicsโwere used to place targeted political advertisements into the social media streams of millions of people; light-hearted entertainment of social media, with its funny cats and celebrity gossip, was sprinkled with political messages. These messages nudged enough people to vote for Donald Trump in the US presidential election of 2016. For their role in the Cambridge Analytica scandals, Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade commission. By the time that happened, Donald Trump had already been declared the winner of the election.
Since 2016, sustained upheaval in the labour market continues to cause a remarkable amount of misery. In the UK, the latest reports state that 5.2 million children live in poverty. Thatโs 1 in every 3 children. In the United States, in 2023, the child poverty rate increased to 13.7 per cent.
Class tensions have always preceded the rise of populist, strong-men leaders. In 2016, when good old fashion propaganda collided with good old fashioned data theft, web technologies graduated from tools of commerce to the ultimate tool of propaganda.
Deep fakes
Artificial Intelligence, including the creation of deep fakes, is coming of age at the exact same moment when content moderation teams are being dismantled and strong man politics is on the rise. This new, unfettered age of disinformation has collided with people that are so desperately poor and devoid of hope that they will vote for anyone who promises to take down the elites who made them suffer so much. Politicians of all stripes sowed the wind. We all now have to reap the whirlwind.
Business managers might not think they have the luxury of thinking about politics, yet if they work in technology, they are simultaneously part of the problem and potentially the solution. Ignorance is no defence.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence is a tidal wave that is currently breaking, and breaking things, all around us. Because itโs already here, commentary on AI is a peculiar, often confusing and an almost always out of date, mixture of description and prediction. Thereโs some consensus on the past but not much consensus on the future. In other words, nobody really knows exactly how the future will unfold.
What we do know is that child poverty is rising on both sides of the Atlantic, strong-men are rising to power with the help of AI and our own private data, social media companies are dismantling their content moderation teams and fact checking seems to have disappeared in many places, massive job losses are on the horizon and white-collars are taking longer to get back into work after being made redundant. AI is likely to become cheaper and easier to wield and exactly where it takes us will depend on the politics and ethics (or lack there of) of the user. And Amaraโs Law tells us that AI is about to get really practical any moment. Welcome to the future.
For more information on why AI may be problematic, check out another one of PA Life’s articles here.ย
