Essay on Artificial Intelligence as a Threat in the Society

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is defined as “the scientific knowledge of the mechanisms that underlie cognition and intelligent behavior and its integration in machines,” according to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. For the past few decades, several predictions were made based on the high incoming of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The transition and its effects on most aspects of the society of businesses and everyday life. It is also essential to note that adequately anticipating the impact of the AI revolution has its implications since AI- automated machines might be our “final invention,” putting an end to human supremacy (Makridakis, 2017, p. 55). Without a doubt, artificial intelligence has a high potential, as both its technology and automation will most likely achieve highly productive and sustainable economic growth. Within the next two decades, its high human intellectual ability poses a severe threat to the workforce market that is initially under human labor. For the first time, it raises concerns about the end of human superiority. While AI can boost the economic growth rate, it also faces significant risks such as employment market fragmentation, increasing inequality, underemployment, and new undesirable industrial structures. EU policy must establish the circumstances for AI’s potential to thrive while also carefully examining how to manage the threats it entails.

Challenges of Artificial Intelligence on the Society

The study re-examines assumptions made about AI’s effects on jobs, inequality, and production, as well as general economic growth. For two reasons, we do so. A few theoretical economic frameworks include AI, and almost none that take demand-side restrictions into account. The second point is that expectations of AI producing enormous job losses and quicker economic and GDP growth conflict with reality: in the developed nations, unemployment is at crisis levels. Income and output growth, on the other hand, is stagnant, and disparities are rising. In the light of accelerating AI progress, this model is a guide to provide a theoretical justification. Jobs aren’t the only thing that might be affected. Economic growth and income stability are certain to be impacted as well. According to (Frey et al., 2017, p.268), the influence of emerging technologies such as AI is subject to an ‘execution lag.’ As AI adoption proceeds, ‘high productivity rate will also be increasing dramatically as an ever-increasing rate of unemployment cascades through the economy,’ according to the report (Nordhaus, 2015, p.2).

Impact on Jobs

Several widely cited original reports suggested that automation of occupations and functions will eventually displace a significant portion of the human labor force. They are anticipated that up to 47% of US occupations might be automated in ten to twenty years in a widely regarded paper (Syverson, 2017, p. 171). This might be even higher in a similar study case of the EU, with up to 54% of occupations being computerized in 10 to 20 years, using a similar methodology. Regular tasks can readily be automated, making specific roles obsolete over time. Customer service/call center operations, document categorization, and recovery, and content moderation, for example, are increasingly relying on increased automation rather than human labor. People are being replaced by automated robotic systems which can effectively move around the area, locate and move stuff, and carry out complex assembling operations. As frightening as these projections may be, recent theoretical and empirical research suggests that the effect of AI-automated jobs lost may be significantly exaggerated. New theoretical revisions, such as those by Bessen (2018), reveal that, based on the flexibility of demand for the product in issue, there is a reasonable probability that jobs might rise as a result of the AI-automation.

Impact on Inequality

Since Artificial intelligence has a diverse influence on various jobs and workers, it may negatively affect earnings. In research in six European nations, two significant channels have been identified through which AI-automation will deteriorate wealth inequality: The benefits, for example, may only flow to a small number of firms due to increased ‘invention costs’ from AI, while the other is when Artificial Intelligence is moving relative labor supply, which in turn affects comparable salaries (Nordhaus, 2015, p. 18). Ideally, as more manual work is substituted by Ai technologies, productivity rises and general earnings growth will be, and the more significant the gap between rich and poor will widen.

There are legitimate concerns that AI would worsen present trends of changing the national income distribution away from labor, resulting in more disparity and wealth concentration in “superstar” enterprises and industries. Another source of rising income inequality may be our inability to categorize revenue at the conventional point—income or exchange— as a smaller percentage of the market is registered, taxed, and dispersed. Instead of taxing income, one apparent alternative would be to tax the wealthy directly, such as a company’s market value (Makridakis, 2017, p. 55). The information era may make tracking income equality simpler than previously, making this technique more feasible than it has been in the past, especially given the difficulties of tracking income.

Impact on Privacy and Autonomy

When evaluating the impact of Artificial Intelligence on behavioral patterns, we’ve finally arrived at a point where ICT has a distinct effect. Domestic surveillance has a long history, and it has been linked to anything from skewed employment prospects to pogroms. However, information and communication technology (ICT) now allows us to preserve permanent records on everyone who generates stored data, such as invoices, bank statements, digital gadgets, or credit history, not to forget any open publishing or social network usage. Our civilization is being transformed by storing and accessing digital information and by the fact that all this data may be accessed using a pattern detection algorithm. By complexity, we have lost the basic presumption of being anonymous. We are all famous to some extent now: random people can identify any of us, whether through facial – recognition or information extraction of shopping or social networks activities (Reed et al., 2016, p.1065). Artificial Intelligence has facilitated robotic cognitive abilities in speech transcription, emotion recognition from audiovisual recordings, and written or video forgery. This technique enables forging by mixing a model of various people’s handwriting or their utterances with a text flow to get a “prediction” or interpretation of how the person would probably write or pronounce that text.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has been transforming societies faster than we understand, yet it isn’t as original or distinctive in human experience as we are frequently made to believe corporations and governments, telecommunications, and natural gas, among other artifactual entities, have previously expanded our powers, changed our economies, and upset our social co-existence, but not universally, for the better. However, we must keep in mind that, above and beyond the economical and governance issues, AI enhances and improves what makes us unique in the first place, especially our problem-solving ability. Considering the ongoing worldwide challenges including security, privacy and development, such improvements are anticipated to remain to be beneficial. Because AI lacks a soul, its philosophy should be transcendental to compensate for its incapacity to sympathize. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fact of life. We must remember what AI inventor Joseph Weizenbaum said: “We cannot let machines make critical decisions for humanity since AI will never have human attributes such as empathy and intelligence to perceive and judge morally.”

References

Frey, C. and Osborne, M. (2013). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization? Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford: p. 50-67.

Makridakis, S. (2017). The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution: Its impact on society and firms. Futures, 90, 46-60. doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2017.03.006

Nordhaus, W. (2015). Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth. Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper no. 2021. Yale University: 1-30.

Reed, S., Akata, Z., Yan, X., Logeswaran, L., Schiele, B., and Lee, H. 2016. “Generative adversarial text to image synthesis.” In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning 48: 1060–1069.

Syverson, C. (2017). Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the US Productivity Slowdown. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2):165–186.