philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The AI road not taken

AI research and development has focused on only a few sectors, ones that are having a net negative impact for humanity, MIT economistDaron Acemogluargues in “Redesigning AI,” a Boston Review book.

“Our current trajectory automates work to an excessive degree while refusing to invest in human productivity; further advances will displace workers and fail to create new opportunities,” Acemoglu writes. AI also threatens “democracy and individual freedoms,” he writes.

Acemoglu’s lead essay in “Redesigning AI” is followed by short responses from AI researchers, labor advocates, economists, philosophers, and ethicists. They discuss economic inequality, possible futures for workers, and what could happen next in AI.

 In the excerpt below, Acemoglu explains why the path we’re on is not set and why the reflexive refrain of “But the market …” doesn’t hold up in the face of basic economics.

It can help us protect their privacy and freedom, too. Plenty of academic research shows how emerging technologies — differential privacy, adversarial neural cryptography, secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption, to name a few — can protect privacy and detect security threats and snooping, but this research is still marginal to commercial products and services.

...Ordinary market forces — which fail to take account of externalities — may therefore deter the types of technologies that have the greatest social value.

... This same reasoning is even more compelling when new products produce noneconomic costs and benefits. Consider surveillance technologies. The demand for surveillance from repressive (and even some democratic-looking) governments may be great, generating plenty of financial incentives for firms and researchers to invest in facial recognition and snooping technologies. But the erosion of liberties is a notable noneconomic cost that it is often not taken into account. ...

See the full story here: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/ai-road-not-taken