Living in the Age of AI (Blog Post #10)

 

Living in the Age of AI (Blog Post #10)

This documentary, In the Age of AI, was completely eye-opening to me. The topic of artificial intelligence has been all over the news this year and has totally reimagined our world. Oh boy, am I terrified of it. Although there are some positives to AI and the documentary highlighted some of those, there are also a lot of downsides. AI takes away jobs, gathers personal information on us, and makes humans lazier. We need to start questioning how ethical it is.

AI takes away many different kinds of jobs such as in factories, offices, and stores. Companies would want to replace humans with AI because it reduces the risk of human error, they can work longer hours, and get paid less. Companies are more interested in how productive their company is rather than how they are taking jobs away from human beings. There is an obvious struggle between capital and labor and this is another example of how the rich are getting richer, and the poor are becoming poorer. 

AI is also known for its success with surveillance. I was surprised by how much AI knows about you. AI wants to know your thoughts, feelings, and even who your friends are in order to predict your actions. This is key for advertising companies because this helps them find their target market. Although it is convenient for things like Alexa and Siri, they are also the ones listening to you. I’m happy that a recent law has been passed that gives you the right to say no to tracking and the right to know if you have been tracked. This has a huge impact on the spread of your information across the internet.

This article here talks about all the things AI is capable of. They are beneficial in medicine because they can do things that even the greatest doctors in the world can’t do. It also talks about how AI can specifically predict if someone is going to buy a product before they actually do it. That is crazy!

Just this past spring semester at school, each of my professors had a chat with us about the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom. Many students started using a site called Chat GPT to cheat on their assignments that they were too lazy to do. My professors said that they were able to recognize when students were using the site because Chat GPT’s work was not quite what a student could do. However, I think the site is working to be able to mimic an individual's writing style, which is really scary. Artificial intelligence in general is making people less productive because AI is an easy way out of things. It’s also really disappointing because each of us has unique and creative views on things that AI can’t duplicate.

Personally, I am terrified of artificial intelligence. What happens when AI takes over the world? Who is going to prevent that from happening? The most important takeaway I found from this documentary is that a lot of people are concerned about AI. This gives me faith that AI won’t take over the world because hopefully, people band together to prevent that from happening.