AI & People from 21st century

Man & his discoveries:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely utilized by many domains. Multiple domains have changed their business strategies drastically after AI took over the market. Many think-tanks and intellectuals profoundly identified that the availability of information & performing analysis on top of the information is most likely the important discovery of mankind after the discovery of fire.

Human beings have reached the top of the food chain and mastered the other living being for over centuries, the important reason behind this vast improvement of human beings is not just because of the discovery of purposeful materials like stone tools and fire, But it is their ability to make the full use of what they have discovered. If discovery of important materials contributed to 20% of the development, then the 80% of other development is because they made a meaningful use of those materials from what they discovered. Just, imagine what would have happened if fire was discovered and no one learned to cook food from it?. Centuries after the discovery of fire and stone tools mankind has reached a stage where it is finding to make meaningful use of information and AI. The question we need to ask here is “Are we using AI & information purposefully/meaningfully?” .Both AI and information ends up being a tool if the relevant purpose is not found to use them.

The discovery of algorithms that can perform tremendous operations on the information gathered is impressive, but it is predominantly used by the business sector to maximize the profit. For example: Big giants like amazon, flipkart, walmart use wise algorithms on top of the information they gathered from their users and sell products wisely. If AI is very powerful, why would humankind stop its usage only to solve business problems?. 

How not to use AI:

It is certainly true that in today’s world we use AI only to make profit for business, but there is no one to blame here. It is a faulty framework where we are part of. We live in a world where everything is heavily commodified. From our morning toothbrush to blanket in our bed, we are surrounded by products.Years ago there used to be societies consisting of markets (a place to exchange goods and materials) but now we live in a market society, meaning our society is surrounded by markets. This transformation from markets within society to the market society made a huge change to human thinking capability across the globe.

To find out the answer for using the AI effectively it is wiser to ask the question how not to use AI?.  For example, let’s take a case study of deploying self-driving (driver less) cars to the world. This is a use-case that creates doubts and debate in the minds of people. The makers of such self driving cars say that human error is the major cause for many road accidents and having an algorithm trained to drive the car can effectively minimize it. The maker’s argument may sound valid but the necessity of the car is not justified here. Many people oppose the self- driving cars because it may lead to job loss for many individuals and it will affect the per capita income of a country. Is it fair to jeopardize the livelihoods of 20 families to avoid one accident?, is a big question that needs to be answered. Economically this may result in a Gini coefficient shift from 0 to 1 resulting in huge economical inequality across the globe. Apart from the job loss argument it is a morality problem that we need to think here. Many countries follow democracy now. Democracy is fundamentally built with the concept of free will. Free will makes us think this statement, “I as an individual choose whom should rule me, I vote for whom I like, I decide what I need to do for a living, I have my freedom of expression and speech” that’s exactly what caused democracy to be a successful political ideology in many countries.

Consider a situation where a dog comes in front of a car which I’m driving and unfortunately I have only two possible outcomes. 1) I will live only when I hit and kill the dog. 2) I can sacrifice my life but I won’t kill the dog. Now I can do whatever I wish here because it’s my free-will. If I choose to live I will end up killing the dog and the vice-versa will kill myself. If in case it’s not a dog and it’s a kid then my decision might be completely different (human emotion is a completely different coefficient). But the point to consider here is, I as a human being decide what is the further action. Imagine the same situation with a self-driving car. A car that has a predefined algorithm and that algorithm determines whether I need to live or the dog needs to live. Now this is completely against the concept of free-will. It is against the philosophy of democracy itself. But unfortunately AI involvement and people’s craze are more for self-driving cars. This is definitely a debatable area where we need to think should an algorithm decide the actions of an individual?. 

The above scenario clearly illustrates one thing. Decision making ability should always be with human beings. AI can only assist a human to make better decisions. Any number of trained data sets might fail in an algorithm’s decision making process as  it  takes decisions based on statistics not on human emotion or morality. Statistically an algorithm will suggest that I’m more likely to die by myself rather than dying from a terror attack. Because suicide ratio is more in world comparing to death by terror attacks. AI’s role in human being’s development can only be like a role of stone tool or fire that helped man to be at the top of a food chain, instead of AI deciding what needs to be discovered. As stated by Pareto’s principle if 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. It is always safer if that 20% of causes come from human decision not from an algorithm. But we need to make sure 20% of the cause will be useful for human development and for making sure that AI is necessary.