The AI Debate Is Happening in a Cocoon
Much of the time, discussions about artificial intelligence are far removed from the realities of how it’s used in today’s world. Earlier this year, executives at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and other AI companies declared in a joint letter that “mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” In the lead-up to the AI summit that he recently convened, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned that “humanity could lose control of AI completely.” Existential risks—or x-risks, as they’re sometimes known in AI circles—evoke blockbuster science-fiction movies and play to many people’s deepest fears.
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But AI already poses economic and physical threats—ones that disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable people. Some individuals or based on algorithms that . Human life is explicitly at stake in certain applications of artificial intelligence, such as AI-enabled like those the . In other cases, governments and corporations have used artificial intelligence to disempower members of the public and conceal their own motivations in subtle ways: in unemployment systems designed to ; in worker-surveillance systems ; in emotion-recognition systems that, despite being based on flawed science, about whom to recruit and hire.
