Lifting the Lid: Inconvenient Truths
It’s not hard to find those who champion the extraordinary advances in AI and what those cutting-edge innovations might mean for the future. But are we hearing enough about the less agreeable aspects of such technological progress?
How do we square the vast amount of energy that powers all the data used in machine learning with trying to reduce carbon emissions? What about the impact on society of automating menial jobs, or the potential for labour exploitation? Can it be right for power – for which read our data – to be concentrated amongst a handful of enormously wealthy companies in Silicon Valley?
Is all this a price we are willing to pay for the benefits that AI can bring? And are journalists being duly critical and demanding answers to the right questions?
Karen Hao of the Wall Street Journal and, until recently, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes herself as a short-term pessimist but long-term optimist on AI. Here she offers her perspective on what she sees as some worrying trends, and why she believes it’s worth fighting for AI to be a meaningfully useful tool.
