The AI Hype of the Emerging Global Brain "Unmaind Global Brain"
In 2019 never has artificial intelligence had so much hype, "Unmaind Global Brain" nor has its dangers of accelerating wealth inequality been less questioned. "The AI Hype of the Emerging Global Brain" It is the catch 22 of the 21st century of human civilization, as the U.S. and China trade a dangerous cold tech war for supremacy.
Human beings have always built machines to help automate and improve tasks for humanity, and they have always feared their own creations. But there’s a serious risk that our inventions and technology could while boosting global GDP, deteriorate labor markets via automation and super-charge the power and influence of the wealthiest 1% compared with the rest of humanity.
This is occurring even as the U.S. Government is falling behind in artificial intelligence. While the Chinese Government has a significant plan to invest in technology and AI to achieve a surveillance state of great sophistication, as early as the 2030s the U.S. will not be able to compete.
Today in 2019, this is counter-intuitive. Artificial Intelligence actually differs from previous human creations. It does not simply surpass human physical capacities as did mechanical inventions such as the pedal loom, the printing press or the car, to cite just a few.
Cold Tech Wars and Tech AI Nations
A few technology companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple are becoming so powerful they have analysts calling them “technological nation-states”. It is these companies that today are a significant part of how AI is evolving at the service of things like censorship (in China), more efficient killing robots and a surveillance state with facial recognition and CCTV cameras everywhere.
Industries like the trucking industry, a $740 billion a year industry are showing signs of great disruption due to self-driving trucks in the years and decades ahead. The healthcare industry which is roughly 14% of the U.S. economy and well over $3 trillion a year will also show major impacts of AI in the decades ahead, for example.
Profit incentives for Deep learning systems endanger ethical guidelines (that don’t yet exist) on how AI is being evolved, implemented and weaponized. There are a plethora of AI books at the start of this dark age of technology revolution, but few seem to see the warning signs.
AI systems, as they exist today, dump and task-specific as they are, are evaluated by how good they are at achieving their objective: winning video games, writing humanlike text, solving puzzles. If they hit on a strategy that fits that objective, they will run with it, without explicit human instruction to do so.
The problem comes when systems become more intelligent. If you put in the wrong objective, then the system pursuing it may take actions that you are extremely unhappy about. Think about how Facebook grew an ad-empire that put the Western democratic model at risk, created privacy invasion data harvesting and ushered in an era of toxic social media that is bad for our mental health, sleep and happiness. That’s not a great testimonial for an algorithmic internet of news feeds and stories that are less and less human.
The profit motive in global capitalism also favors data harvesting and the implementation of surveillance capitalism that has now begun the first stage of infiltration on the free will and human rights of global citizens. Since AI systems require huge amounts of data, the input and output of human beings have been trivialized as “data” that no longer even belong to them.
AI will Usher in Augmented Healthcare
However, powerful companies tell us that AI will also empower more efficiency and benefits such as healthcare. From superior medical diagnosis to new AI-focused tools for doctors and healthcare workers, AI is getting ready to transform fields such as healthcare, finance and, even later, education.
Even without general AI making any breakthroughs, the way humanity is utilizing AI might be misguided. From engineering the planet with AI to engineering our bodies, the business objectives could obscure the ethics involved in such a process of disruptive digital transformation which we are undergoing.
On the stock market, bots fall for headlines that humans recognize as being deceptive or manipulative. Algorithms are not infallible and the companies that utilize them have a vested interest in their dominance. Humans are becoming incapable of even regulating a dumb-algorithmic world, so what happens when and if AI and deep learning evolve a more generalized intelligence?
However, Artificial Intelligence is not about building intelligent machines. It is about having machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. So what happens when smart machines are able and decide to do things no human would have thought of? The automation of jobs and tasks humans are capable of could make the majority of humans in the 21st century obsolete -- like biological critters without an economic function in what civilization might become.
As Google pushes its smart city concept trial on the city of Toronto, you get an idea of the kind of data gathering that will be ubiquitous in tomorrow’s cities. China’s vision of AI embedded in urban settings is even more extreme. What happens to us as a species when we begin to embed AI in our own human systems? The advent of the brain-computer-interface (BCI) is also coming. When they go mainstream, mobile phones will be seen like the thumb beatings of cavemen and primitive bygone times.
Humans will Weaponize AI on Users
You don’t need to envision superintelligent machines and AGI to already see the dangers involved in how AI and algorithms have gone to scale in society. The means to control and influence is too lucrative to give up. Witness the cash-cow that is digital advertising. Even companies like Amazon realize that along with the Cloud (AWS), Ads could become a source of sustainable revenue that would allow it to focus on R&D at new levels.
Recently, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) said it believes the U.S. government still confronts enormous work before it can transition AI from “a promising technological novelty into a mature technology integrated into core national security missions”. China is investing more than the United States in artificial intelligence, said the report, which referred to the Asian nation more than 50 times.
Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have put more than 1 million people to work between 2000 and 2018. Yet all is not well in how these monopolies are seen as the best chance for the U.S. to compete with China, so the threat of serious anti-trust regulation occurring against them is significantly diminished. This is because the Chinese state is starting to weaponize Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance, Xiaomi, Meituan, and its best technology companies into significant competitors in the global market.
For every Starbucks, there is a Luckin. For every Facebook, there is a ByteDance, for every Apple, there is a Huawei, for every Amazon there is Alibaba, and so the list goes on. Significant IP theft has resulted in a world where China is no longer the copy-cat but the trailblazer in mobile payments, app customer experiences, E-commerce, and facial recognition tech among others.
The Global AI Brain Has Chinese Values
What is becoming clear is this emerging global brain based on AI and surveillance capitalism will have distinctly Chinese influences. Silicon Valley, even without breaking up the Facebooks and Googles of the world, will gradually be unable to compete with how the Chinese tech dynasty evolves. We are still a few years before this gradually becomes perceptible.U.S. government funding in artificial intelligence has fallen short and the country needs to invest in research, train an AI-ready workforce and apply the technology to national security missions, an independent government-commissioned panel said in an interim report on Monday, November 4th, 2019.
AI is in its infancy and how we design ethical artificial intelligence, regulate AI appropriately or allocate tasks to the right systems has no easy solution and even the climate and debate have not yet matured to an appropriate level where we realize the importance of the problem and the right questions.
In all likelihood living in a world with AI will be one of the huge tradeoffs. In all likelihood our freedoms, human rights, and data privacy are being curtailed -- no matter where we live today on the planet. The benefits are also debatable and the wealth inequality that AI profiteering is driving is also going to impact capitalism more brutally in the next two decades than many believe today is even realistic. I was recently called out for “fear-mongering” in how I write about the subject. But I have actual convictions and data from many sources to come to this conclusion, including a battalion of AI researchers themselves.
As capitalism augments our introduction of AI into all of our human systems, in a world where economic growth is king, AI naturally falls into predictable traps of creating a less fair human world. That’s a stage that I think we are now entering in the 2020s and it will take some mighty transition to endure, both morally and economically for those most vulnerable in the middle class and lower.
AI, like King Midas, wants everything it touches turn to gold. If it gets its way, unfortunately, that included his food and his drink and his family members, and he died in misery and starvation. However, in this world scenario, AI is only too happy in a world where data is the new gold. Data is the new oil. In places like China where religion is not tolerated, AI becomes the new deity, money the new God. Human beings, unlike AI, need to believe in something.
Related reading: China’s Artificial Intelligence is Fueling Innovation
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