The Age of AI

After watching this documentary, I was shocked by how much power artificial intelligence has in this day and age. It's both incredible and terrifying how much AI can do and how much information it can gather without us even knowing it.

At the beginning of the documentary, it addressed the game AlphaGo, a complex strategy game that people have spent years growing their skills at. It surprised me that an AI program was able to not only beat these well-experienced professionals but also that it made a move in the game that the professionals hadn’t even fathomed of making. It's not surprising that this is remembered as the pivotal moment when AI became mature and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. 

What struck me the most from watching this documentary was how many people have lost their jobs due to AI systems that can do their jobs better than they do. To make things worse, plants are getting torn down because these robots are taking peoples' jobs.

This is concerning because people are losing money and losing work as a result of technology that doesn’t need the money that comes from these jobs to do things like pay taxes, support a family, pay for groceries, etc. It's a very sad reality.

Another thing mentioned in the documentary is that our productivity gets better over time, and before, our pay and income rates would also increase with these productivity rates. However, now the income rates aren’t matching the productivity rates. People are losing work and losing income, yet, due to AI productivity is still increasing. This change is scary how quickly things can switch places.

Another chilling aspect is that one robot can now do the jobs of ten people.

I was also surprised to hear that children with parents who have lost their jobs to automation are more likely to repeat a grade, fail out of school, drop out of school, etc. It’s frightening to know that AI is not only affecting people in the workforce, but children as well who haven’t gotten a chance to establish themselves and are already being put in a bad spot.

A question raised by one of the interviewees that resonated with me was, "If we continue to go in an automated system, what do we do from there?" He also said that there are only people at the top (above AI) but nobody in the middle or at the bottom to support a family. Therefore, even if we crash in the future, the automated system will still be there to take over. It’s concerning that the future is so uncertain as a result of AI.

One thing to keep in mind as a result of this is that with how advanced AI has become, it will always be there. The best way to improve our society with automation still being around is to implement it in positive ways that won't take people out of jobs or invade their privacy.

On the topic of privacy, it’s scary to know that Google is trying to learn everything that it can about us. In the documentary, one of the interviewees said that an employee at Google told him he’d be horrified at how much they knew about him. This is an insane invasion of privacy and what makes it even scarier is that people don’t even know it’s happening. It’s one thing to gather information from someone through a survey or some other form of information gathering but to take it from people when they’re unaware and think that they’re the ones in control, is absolutely terrifying. 

Another issue we're facing right now is that because technology made things better in the past, we've started to trust it thinking it would always make things better. This belief is just now starting to shift and in my opinion, this is definitely for the better. 

In terms of social media, there's a lot more information gathering happening behind than scenes than we're aware of. It’s chilling to think that on social media, it doesn’t matter what we’re posting, just that we’re posting. It’s because of our use of social media that it has predictive abilities to tell us what it thinks we would like. It’s unsettling to think of all the gathering social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are doing every time we log on and post. 

Furthermore, products like Alexa and Google Home are being trained to not only recognize who you are but the things that you do to understand more about you in real-time to make inferences. This way, the AI can target ads and other information to you that it thinks you’ll benefit from. This micro-behavioral targeting is directed towards individuals based on an intimate understanding of their personalities. This is unsettling because technology isn’t supposed to have that intimate understanding of who we are as people. To me, this seems like a step too far in terms of privacy.

One of the biggest social media platforms guilty of taking peoples' data is Facebook. In the documentary, Zuckerberg claims that Facebook is going to make privacy protection a priority and I personally don’t believe this. Facebook has already taken so much data from people, how can it be that easy to just erase all of that technology? What happens to all the data that’s already been collected?

Another thing that scared me in this documentary was the high-tech surveillance and AI in China that allegedly allows them to identify who would be a terrorist and who needs re-education. How can an AI system possibly know this and what happens to a person’s reputation if the AI is wrong? That could ruin someone’s life forever. Although I can see the idea behind this technology and how it could be a positive advancement for national security, it seems highly unethical and targeted toward certain ethnic groups.

What I liked about this documentary was that even though it brings up a lot of issues with AI, it also proposed future solutions on how to avoid privacy invasion at its extent. In the next 12 months, we’ll be able to go to any company and ask them what information they have on us and they’ll have to give us an answer as a part of our “right to know.” It’s also incredible that at some point in the future, with the click of a button, we’ll be able to go online and say “Don’t sell my information,” then, this will be spread to all different companies to prevent them from selling our information as well. I think that this is a step in the right direction toward eliminating future privacy invasions.