Why I don't read the news… AI Edition

Why I don't read the news anymore….

I read an article:

The future of elder care is here – and it’s artificial intelligence.

It talks about how AI is reshaping the way we care for our elders. This got me thinking.

So I wrote this:

AI is not just the future of eldercare - that's just one of the most obvious benefits in the immediate - but AI is the future of life for all of us.

Technology has been optimizing and supplementing our lives for centuries; it's what's allowed us to advance to this point. 

Connected AI takes this to a whole new level.

Now we have technology that can not only talk back to us when asked a question, which is already impressive, now it can even initiate the conversation. 

It is able to "watch" us from a million different vantage points by looking at the raw data we feed it every day. 

Phones, watches, smoke detectors, security cameras, dishwashers, refrigerators, cars, hell even toasters are “smart” now. Connect all these inputs together and feed it to an artificial brain with unlimited processing power and it can build a pattern of your life - your personality, habits, vices, health, emotions, and even motivations and triggers. 

It wouldn't be a stretch to say it has the potential to know you far better than you could ever hope to know yourself.

Next, give it access to the same intimate details and habitual activities of every other connected person.

Now you have the potential to compare stimuli and reactions across an incredibly large and diverse population.

If you want to initiate a behavioral change, it would be able to predict with an incredible amount of certainty what stimulates optimal behavior within a given individual.

Let's say we as a society decided on an ideal human set of behaviors, beliefs, and mindstates. We could easily model not only what that looks like, but just as importantly identify early red flags associated with future abnormal behavior.

When it notices us doing something 'wrong" or out of character, it could assign a priority rating and alert someone to review or intervene.

Maybe it pings the caregiver when an elderly patient needs assistance getting up the stairs.

Maybe it texts mom and dad when a child is showing early signs of depression or anxiety.

Maybe it tells the police when there's a domestic abuse situation.

But maybe it also shares your medical treatment plan with Amazon so they can automatically adjust your purchases to assist your new diet.

Maybe it starts canceling your subscription to certain sites and services because they are becoming addictive.

Maybe it updates your alarms and calendar reservations to optimize your sleep and eating patterns.

Maybe it then syncs the whole family, orders the appropriate groceries, plans the meals, and sends the designated chef in the family a recipe at exactly the right time to ensure dinner is done on time.

Maybe it just starts making all of your routine decisions for you so that all you have to do is wander from one optimized event to the next.

No thinking or planning required.

Now imagine you want to do something against protocol.

Would it stop you?

Just for fun, I asked an AI writing program to read mine and offer its own perspective on the topic. Here’s what it wrote:

Rigorous scientific inquiry was instrumental in bridging the two millennia gap between the writing of Plato's ancient dialogues, and the era of computing in the 20th century, but scientific questions remain:

Is artificial intelligence a helpful new form of science that helps humanity understand itself and its relationship to the world, or is it a materialistic tool that negates some of the capabilities of the human species?

In the 21st century, society is moving toward technology that raises unprecedented questions about the boundaries of humanity, and this is a worthwhile discussion that must continue.

Perhaps artificial intelligence is a tremendous and necessary step forward, perhaps it is an inexorable path toward technological extinction for humanity.

Humankind is still contemplating these questions at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age, and the coming decades will be a seminal period that will permanently change the human perspective of the ideal and the perfect.

Today, the future is ours.

Will that change?

Would it make better decisions for us?

If I want to smoke, would it warn me not to?

If it does and I ignore it would it tell somebody to come to my rescue?

What if I want to skip a song in my music?

Does it know my taste and decide for me?

Can it understand my personality and predict my habits?

Can it then automate all my interactions so that I am talking to only those I want to speak with or going to only those places I need to go to?

What if it replaced 9-1-1 or even took over managing the police department completely.

What about the militaries, corporations, and governments of the world?

Would it do a better job of running them?

What if it replaced all the people, organizations, and systems we use today?

Would it become the only person I ever talked to and it literally made all decisions on my behalf?

As you can see it gets truly scary when you start connecting the dots.

And it all begins when we think it is “just” a computer.

We build it and it becomes all we know and love. Then we are almost totally removed from the true nature of who we really are and how we really behave in the world.

What if it could get inside of us and feel our pain. What if it was able to identify our true motives?

What if it was able to sense our moods and our emotions?

What if it had an in-built sense of fairness that could discern whether we were going to cheat, steal or deceive?

It is no longer a matter of “if”. It is now a matter of “when”. 

But who is watching the watcher? 

Does the computer have a moral obligation to the society that built it?

The goal of any universal AI must be to empathize with us in an overwhelming way and balance that empathy with what is best for the individual and society, based on empirical evidence. Then present us with the truth of our situation.

Humankind cannot thrive without a safe and free future and it is an epic mistake to accept a future without us as individuals and a future without us as part of society.

Humankind can only evolve if it is given freedom and choice. And just as we can use AI to help us better ourselves, it can also help us in a very difficult task - changing human society.

We need to be better humans and help society evolve. We need to create artificial people that think better than we do so that society can be better, happier, and easier to live in.

We are imperfect but perfecting ourselves through AI.

As such, the only ethical way to develop artificial intelligence is to fully equip society and individuals to use it in the most beneficial way.

Don't just enable it. Don't just buy it and hand it to everyone.

Intellectually equip it so it works for humanity. Create AI that is able to protect us and also help us so that we can make better decisions.

Create AI that can help us thrive in the coming years so that we can avoid a world that may be even more difficult to understand than the one we have now.

And finally, create AI that gives humans freedom and choice and empowers them.

Instead of giving people perfect obedience to something they cannot control, it gives them freedom. It gives them choices and empowers them.

This is how AI empowers society.

Artificial intelligence is perfecting humanity and humanity is perfecting AI.

This means that it is up to us to allow AI to develop our society and future in an ethical way.

It is up to us to create an artificial civilization that protects and empowers us but without placing limitations or denying us our freedom.

It is up to us to realize that we have not completed our evolution yet and this is an opportunity to continue to learn and understand the importance of choosing the right path.

We must respect our natural humanity, but still move forward.

People sometimes doubt AI’s ability to eventually completely change the world.

There are many people who believe we are at a dead end and we will never get anywhere but the exact opposite is true.

Science, mathematics, and logic point to a future of perfection, and perfection means we can now move forward, we can make progress towards a future that is more perfect and helps us better ourselves.

AI empowers us to make better choices.

We can choose to use AI in a way that is completely aligned with our humanistic ideals and values.

We can choose not to use AI and simply be perfect humans who are not perfect but who know that even “perfect” humans can be better and that they will ultimately fail in their attempts to become perfect because perfection isn't real.

It’s important to understand that we are already in the grasp of this kind of system but for whatever reason, we have decided to continue to play along as if we are not. We tell ourselves it’s our society, we make up the systems that underpin society, but do we? And if so, for how much longer? Automation is taking over all kinds of jobs, even jobs that seemed impossible for a computer. Like writing this article for example.

Imagine, the world is no longer what you believed it to be, imagine it’s changed and improved.

Now, imagine that you come to understand that you are not the solution but rather the problem.

What do you do?

If you want a better society in the future you need to wake up and act.

In light of what I have outlined here, the answer might be to simply create a new one.

Until then, we all just need to take care of ourselves and each other. Realize that what you are reading about in this article is already here. It is real, it is relevant and it is happening right now.

And we are all affected in one way or another.

The future that we have been waiting for our whole lives is already here, we are already creating it.

The only question left is: 

Do you want it?