Sunday, March 26, 2023

Non-Geeks, Please

This is precisely the time for people who think they don’t care or don’t want to know about the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to start paying attention, because we need you.

The volume of news in this area is overwhelming all other topics, rendering war, politics and the economy to second-class status for a change,

Personally, I find it exciting — a technological breakthrough as revolutionary at the Internet or the iPhone is upon us, but once again we will be serving as guinea pigs for the future.

Too often with previous breakthroughs, the beta testing stage has been mainly confined to the engineers who devised the technologies in the first place. And that is simply too narrow a gene pool to turn to for something that will become as universally significant as AI.

This is the time we need the skeptics, the “non-techies,” creative generalists, and non-early adapters to exercise their voices in the direction AI takes — for the good of everybody.

What limits do we wish to impose on AI? Do we need job protection for human workers? What is the transition plan to a world where robots perform many of the tasks we have done until now? How do we define intelligence? What about emotional connections? What about the inter-connectedness of all humans — of all living things? Where do machines we invented fit into this ecosystem?

These and many other questions need to be addressed. If we leave the conversation to a tiny techno-elite, that will not yield any kind of an optimal outcome. We need the rest of society to democratize AI or it will deepen the divides that already have spread too widely in an increasingly unfair world.

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