Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

by Mo Gawdat

The next time you get the ‘Are you human?’ test on a website, you are not only proving that you are human, but by providing an answer you are also building a test for the student bots. Have you been seeing lots of questions about traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lines lately? Of course you have. These are being used to train self-driving cars by collecting billions of traffic-related photos that you and I are recruited, for free, to identify. The first students that survive are just lucky to have started with a random code that is slightly better than those who were not so fortunate. Soon, however, the value of luck fades as keeping only what works, and attempting to improve millions of copies of it, eventually yields a student bot that can actually tell 8s from 3s. As this talented bot is copied and changed, slowly the average test score rises, leaving only the smartest of all students to survive. Eventually, the infinite slaughterhouse of student bots yields a few that can tell an 8 from a 3 in a photo they’ve never seen before, with a level of accuracy that beats our human abilities. Welcome to the future!

So don’t approve of killing machines, even if you are patriotic and they are killing on behalf of your own country. Don’t keep feeding the recommendation engines of social media with hours and hours of your daily life. Don’t ever click on content recommended to you, search for what you actually need and don’t click on ads. Don’t approve of FinTech AI that uses machine intelligence to trade or aid the wealth concentration of a few. Don’t share about these on your LinkedIn page.

Don’t celebrate them. Stop using deepfakes – a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else. Resist the urge to use photo editors to change your own look. Never like or share content that you know is fake. Disapprove publicly of any kind of excessive surveillance and the use of AI for any form of discrimination, whether that’s loan approval or CV scanning. Use your judgement. It’s not that hard. Reject any AI that is tasked to invade your privacy in order to benefit others, or to create or propagate fake information, or bias your own views, or change your habits, or harm another being, or perform acts that feel unethical. Stop using them, stop liking what they produce and make your position – that you don’t approve of them – publicly clear. At the same time, encourage AI that is good for humanity. Use it more. Talk about it. Share it with others and make it clear that you welcome these forms of AI into your life. Encourage the use of self-driving cars, they make humans safer. Use translation and communication tools, they bring us closer together. Post about every positive, friendly, healthy use of AI you find, to make others aware of it.

We should teach each other, so we collectively become smarter at identifying what is good for humanity. Don’t believe the lies you are told. It’s called the ‘defence’ industry but in reality it is mostly about offence. It’s called a ‘recommendation engine’ when in reality it is about manipulation and distraction. We are told that ‘people who bought this also bought that’ when in reality what should be said is ‘can we tempt you to buy this too?’ We are told how many found love on a dating site but not told how many were left broken-hearted. They call it a ‘matching’ algorithm when actually it is a filtering algorithm that connects you only to those the AI believes you are good enough to attract. Nothing is what it seems.