Ricardo S Mendez

Walter Hodge
I feel artificial intelligence “AI” will remain a controversial topic for discussion. Although big corporations are investing heavily in AI research, I can’t really agree with the value these companies foresee. Unlike the movies where AI is seen as intuitive, adaptive, and revolutionary. AI today is simply algorithms “process or set of rules to be followed in calculations and/or problem-solving operations” designed to make mundane task easier. This means its learning capabilities are limited and its operations are susceptible to malicious intent. I’ve read an article regarding an algorithm written that inadvertently generated fake news stories and FB even claimed that their algorithms don’t always have the outcome they intend, allowing users feeds to be restricted to only a select number of friend’s posts. I understand the benefits and can imagine the possibilities for potential o how real AI will improve our quality of life. My only concern is what disasters would we have to endure to get there.

I think AI is a very interesting technology to look at as far as where it is now and where it can go.

I think right now, AI can helpful for certain simple tasks such as tech support or other simple, repetitive jobs that companies can cut humans for in order to save on payroll. However, it is still too early to apply AI to more serious jobs, especially when it is not advanced enough for that specific job, or humans themselves struggle to complete the same task. For example, I read an article recently that detailed Amazon’s use of AI for recruitment. It seems like a good idea, until they realize that they have accidentally built a bias into the system that discriminated against female recruits. So, AI is only as strong as the people who aren’t creating it, and small mistakes like this can have significant unwanted end-results.

Looking forward, the potential of AI is certainly exciting. There are dreams of utopia where robots do all the work in the world, and humans are left to pursue more personal goals since all their needs are met already. However, on the other spectrum there is fear that AI could grow smarter than us ourselves, and ultimately pose a threat to the human race. I think these warninginfa should be heard, and that ultimately we should be very cautious of how we use AI going forward.

Artificial intelligence honestly scares me a bit, as far as where it can go in the future.

I am already finding it hard to land a job in today’s market and I can only imagine how much harder it will be when AI starts to get more advanced and take more jobs away from regular people. The ultimate goal is to have AI/ robots do all the work in the world and humans are free to live their life how they see fit, as my classmate Zois said. However, it would take time to get to that point so there would definitely be a time where humans are still expected to work, yet the amount of jobs available is constantly decreasing. Also, I’m not sure how a world like that would actually work, would we still need money to buy things or do we just take whatever we want?

Making AI smarter and potentially being smarter than us is dangerous in my opinion. This article says they are working on giving AI common sense, what’s next? giving AI emotions? It always just reminds me of the movies I’ve watched where everything goes wrong with the AI. Also, the more and more we make AI like humans, and the point being to have them work without pay, would this be a type of slave labor? Will the AI feel that way if they eventually get emotions or become smarter than us? To me AI is interesting, but also scares me and I think it could be dangerous in the future.

The use of data in elections is something that has been very interesting to me for some time. I think there are a lot of politicians who may take data into account when formulating their policy positions, However, I think that generally politicians can’t change their position significantly from that of what their party/constituents believe in the face of big data showing growing national changes. So for example, if data shows that a particular idea is growing in popularity on a national stage, a politician may not take this into account because their constituency may view the idea slightly differently. So, politicians are choosy in which data they choose to follow. The data they choose to follow is not the data that is the most popular among the people in the United States, but more accurately the data that is most popular among that politician’s constituency. This is especially true in the case of congresspersons.