… in the United States, public investment in science seems to be redirected and concentrated on AI at the expense of other disciplines. And Big Tech companies are consolidating their control over the AI ecosystem. In these ways and others, AI seems to be making everything worse.
This is not the whole story. We should not resign ourselves to AI being harmful to humanity. None of us should accept this as inevitable, especially those in a position to influence science, government, and society. Scientists and engineers can push AI towards a beneficial path. Here’s how.
The essential point is that, like with the climate crisis, a vision of what positive future outcomes look like is necessary to actually get things done. Things with the technology that would make life better. They give a handful of examples and provide broad categories if activities that can help steer what is done.
The main goal of artificial intelligence, and this is why so much money is being poured into it, is to make AI the oppressor of ordinary people. This means, for example, improving video surveillance systems, or more precisely, creating AI-powered cameras that can accurately recognize human emotions and predict actions.