As the use of Artificial Intelligence grows in our society our collective consciousness is awakening to its dangers. I have spent my career building Artificial Intelligence to fight fraud and identify theft and understand how the algorithms are built, what their capabilities are and how they are used in a corporate setting. Today’s Artificial Intelligence is very dangerous but not in the way most people believe. The current path of AI development is unlikely to lead to a conscious entity that will take over humanity regardless of what AI firms are saying. I believe that this hype to raise money, and a red herring to hiding AI’s true threat. Artificial Intelligence’s dangers lie in its ability to manipulate people effortlessly, convincingly mimic people and be a force multiplier for a given task. But AI is only truly dangerous because it emerged when thoughtful corporate greed had given way to rampant egoistical hysteria. What I mean by this is, I am not convinced that today’s chief executives care about profit maximizing or ethics in terms of maintaining long term valuation. They have so much wealth destroying a company just for their personal ego or for a bit of fun makes sense to them. What little check and balances capitalism had on making firms ethical no longer works. What does that mean for you and your family? We are on our own to protect ourselves, our families and our community as a whole. 

First, I have seen Artificial Intelligence as a force for good. What it is doing in medicine and science in general will benefit humankind for generations. The threat lies in how it is used on social media, marketing, risk management, and its use to displace workers. In social media it is grooming consumers, especially kids, to be reliant on them by mimicking friendship and intimacy just like a con-artisit. In marketing it is using techniques similar to dark patterns to play to our cognitive biases resulting in us making poor decisions. In risk modeling it is creating cheap models with serious biases and flaws that are being ignored. And we risk a lost generation of workers as companies opt for AI agents of employees, mostly driven not by greed but hysteria. I have worked with the best code and art generating AI and they do not compare to an average employee hype aside. The decision is not being made based on facts.

What can we do? If AI changed everything, so should we. Do not buy AI generated art. Try and watch films that use real special effects, not AI generated ones. If a company lays off workers, spend this time or money on those firms. Support open source AI initiatives to fight back. Educate yourself and your family to spot AI and mitigate its impact. Do not invest in firms with questionable ethics. You are not helpless but you do have to change everything. 

And, as Henry Ford realized, a society will not succeed if the workers cannot buy the products it produces. At our current rate of work displacement these firms will run out of consumers. I would rather we stand up against this trend before it reaches its inevitable conclusion.