7 chilling risks of AI which could change the world forever
Topics: News, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, World News
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/FREDERIC J. BROWN
Topics: News, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, World News
It's being trumpeted by tech bros the world over as 'The Future' - but AI brings with it many risks and dangers.
There are some potentially positive uses for the new technology, perhaps most obviously in medicine to assist medics in diagnosing and treating patients.
It's possible that AI could pick up on signs and symptoms earlier, allowing doctors to catch things like cancer before it's too late.
Beyond that, AI might even be useful in assessing a given patient's risk in the future, for example, of cancer or heart disease - and help them to take steps to reduce their risk.
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Unfortunately, while these uses could save lives, it seems the majority of conversation around AI appears focused on the generative type - those programmes which churn out clickbait videos of bears on trampolines, or what if Picasso drew a Spiderman comic.
But with AI comes risks, both physical and social, so let's get into seven of the biggest.
Perhaps the most commonly talked about impact of AI is in the fact that it may be used to replace a lot of jobs.
There's absolutely a conversation to be had around using technology to minimise the human need to work, freeing us from unnecessary or meaningless labour and allowing us to lead more fulfilling lives.
Sadly, we live in a society where the vast majority of people are given a choice between either employment or starvation and homelessness, so if you replace people's jobs without providing them with another means to survive, we have a problem.
We are already teetering on the brink of climate catastrophe, and adding the huge power and water demands of AI data centers only adds to the burden.
Not only that, but the data centers themselves have been shown to pollute the surrounding environment with toxic substances.
AI uses a huge amount of electricity, adding to the need to generate more when power grids still overwhelmingly rely on fossil fuels despite advances in renewables.
There is an argument that AI could be used to tackle the climate crisis, but the pollution and power problems it creates are here now, and any benefit is theoretical.
Social media has already created a new age of misinformation, but AI-generated images have made it nearly impossible to take anything you see online at face value unless you know for certain it's a trusted source.
It goes further than this as well, with chatbots hallucinating incorrect information and even directing users to disturbing and violent actions, as well as reinforcing extreme or straight-up delusional beliefs.
There's also the horrible use of AI to generate fake videos of real people, including in pornographic or criminal activities which they have never done.
Becoming trapped in an AI echo chamber might even lead someone to reject outright evidence from other sources, even if they are highly credible and well-researched.
The result is beyond just misinformation - it undermines the very fabric of our reality.
AI might allow you to generate a video of 'what if Jon Snow met Darth Vader', but it is never creating that content.
That video or picture, or text is generated by the programme scraping a database of real source material and using that as a guide, with no credit to the artist who created the original work.
One of the biggest criticisms that artists have of people who use AI to generate images is that the process of creating art is the most important part of it - the hours spent practising your scales, or perfecting your colour mixing, or writing and rewriting ARE the art, not the end result.
AI not only steals the content, but it also robs people of the most important part of art, which is the process of actually making it.
Of course, surveillance is nothing new in the tech world.
The entire tech economy, including Google, Meta, and Amazon, is underpinned by the collection and selling of data via mass surveillance, with the term 'surveillance capitalism' even being coined.
There is a saying that if the product is free, you're the product, but this is actually incorrect; a better analogy would be that if the product is free, you're like a cow which has willingly strapped itself into the milking machine.
The introduction of AI into this system has terrifying implications for the sheer detail and scale of information which could be harvested, from spilling your soul to ChatGPT to tracking eye movements on a screen to make sure you are actually watching an ad before allowing it to play.
With any new technology, it's only a matter of time before someone thinks up a way to use it as a weapon - and AI is no different.
From AI-controlled drones to machine guns, and, of course, cyber attacks, the potential is terrifying.
And with the development of weaponry comes another risk as well.
Finally, there is of course the full science fiction option, the lessons taught to us by Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune and i Robot.
Our culture is awash with warnings about granting consciousness to something we have created ourselves - warnings many tech types appear all too keen to ignore, like Homer Simpson running over dozens of 'no dumping' signs to dump his silo of pig crap in Springfield Lake.
The threat of AI becoming independent and hostile is one which is possible, and one which needs safeguards to help protect us all.