Is AI a threat to social order and humanity?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its new avatar Generative AI is hailed as the best thing which can happen to humanity. History is testament to the fallacies of human innovations; we are very good at creating new things but not so good at understanding the long-term impact of the things we create; fossil fuels and associated products such as plastic & asphalt, which were once hailed as the epitome of high-end engineering and blessing for humans, are most despised commodities in current times. Ironically on a regular basis I hear remarks from my learned technology colleagues, made with lot of ingrained wisdom, that ‘Data is the new oil’; the thought that immediately crosses my mind is that ‘If data is new oil, I hope AI is not the carbon of tomorrow’; one has destroyed the planet forever and the other can potentially destroy the social order. A report from Mckinsey global institute states that between 2023-2030 AI will lift up global GDP by 1.2% every year and this will mainly come from substitution of labour by automation and increased innovation in products and services – in other words productivity increase by job losses, and not just in hundreds but in millions (400-800million by one estimate). But this is just one aspect, though not something to ignore, and let us understand some of the wide-reaching impacts of AI on society and humans.

We see machines all around us, in our homes, on the road and at workplaces. Contemporary machines do what humans want them to do, take a simple device: a kitchen oven waits to be switched on to cook the meal you want and when you want. Once it has been empowered with cognitive intelligence, it can potentially make all those decisions which you make for dinner, rendering you not so relevant. Bit of this future is already here, many of us no longer choose the music we want to hear, AI models trained on historical data are choosing music for you based on the time of the day and other factors such as week of the day and weather. These products are marketed by highlighting the differentiated featutres of personalisation and convenience, but under the hood they render you irrelevant to yourself and over a long time weaken your abilities to make even simple decisions. If you look carefully, you will see this invasion of smart aliens at work as well. Your machines no longer need instructions from you and are performing many actions without your approval. Knowledge workers who work with software tools to do their jobs, will not need to make decision about the regular activities such as setting prices for accepting trades and patient discharge approval from hospital. In many companies Human Resources (HR) activities which require human empathy have been given up and data driven models are making those decisions. Once you are not involved in critical decision making at work and are also not required to execute day to day repetitive tasks, then why would for-profit capitalist business organisations employ you? The scale of mass irrelevance of human race will make humans useless both for the social and economic purpose. Humans will be no longer required to run the economic and social engine, at least not at the current scale and size. In year 2022/23 UK government’s benefits budget is approximately ￡234 billion, and size of GDP is around ￡2.27 trillion. If GDP grows by 1.2% by 2030, with the impact of AI, it would be interesting to see the impact on benefits budget with direct job losses, mental and physical health issues with direct impact on NHS and long-term impact on the social order. Elon Musk predicts that “computers, intelligent machines, and robots seem like the workforce of the future.” “And as more and more jobs are replaced by technology,” he says, “people will have less work to do and ultimately will be sustained by payments from the government.”

Not even 0.1% of the world population understands AI, but by an estimate 2billion of the people will be directly impacted by AI (2030); if it is so, should we adopt a technology which is exponentially increasing in complexity and due to its evolving nature can't possibly be fully understood in terms of its long-term impact; and also is it democratic to do that? Democracy is about people's participation in decision making, is AI not just attacking the fundamental pillar of civilised societies which we are so proud of?

Proponents of AI will argue, any new technology has an adoption curve and time will make it easy to adopt and understand it. But AI is not like the machines of past, the fundamental differences from the mechanical machines and AI driven machines is the cognitive power. Those machines of past removed activities and jobs which require physical power and skills, AI is going to relieve humans from cognitive activities, causing irreparable damage to the human abilities (carbon impact).?

So how should we act? I was thinking of a complex multidimensional answer but I really liked the simplicity and potential impact of what Yuval Harari suggests, ‘’make AI part of the political and social agenda, not only scientific agenda”. This problem is too serious to be left to engineers, who know how to create wonderful products but have no ability to judge their long-term impact. And never leave it to capitalist organisations, who work for the profit of shareholders with no concern for social order. One of my colleagues was explaining to me the other day how precise engineering has to be to pump out crude from offshore wells, I agree, but now we know the other side of that marvellous innovation as well, which was not so well known at that time. Thus coming from the fraternity I can say that engineers can build good technical solutions but they are not best qualified to decide the future of humankind, we as a society and political class needs to take control before it is too late.

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All of the above thoughts are mine and do not represent any specific reference to any institute, organisation or individual. ?

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Reference: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/notes-from-the-ai-frontier-modeling-the-impact-of-ai-on-the-world-economy

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https://www.zippia.com/advice/ai-job-loss-statistics/#:~:text=Automation%20and%20AI%20will%20lift,by%202030%20around%20the%20world.

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https://www.ynharari.com/book/21-lessons-book/

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