Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new. It has been quietly, behind the scenes, influencing your life for decades. Recently the power, reach and capabilities of Artificial Intelligence has accelerated nearly exponentially and, via chat bots, everyone can see first hand its power. 

The promise of AI seems boundless. It can find hidden patterns to help uncover hard to detect cancer. It can see galaxies and planets undetectable by other means. It can finish your English homework in just a few minutes. It seems as though it can do, well, just about anything.

The dangers are clear too. While AI can do your homework for you, you learn nothing from the experience but how to cheat. Companies can use it to replace artists and programmers but lose their institutional knowledge, weaken their product and forfeit future growth for short term cost savings. You can lean on chat bots as a friend but risk serious psychological damage. More threateningly, how the current AIs are being trained bakes in all the negative aspects of our society from harmful gender stereotypes to racism. And all the while AI is generating tons of carbon not only by its use but also by the hugely inefficient code it has generated. (In future posts we will break down each of these in greater detail.)

Why do we still go down this path of rapid, thoughtless, deployment of AI? Greed, laziness, fear and hope. Executives, in truth, do not want employees with free will even if those are exactly the type of employees you want for growth. Employees with free-will might say no or (shutter to think) ask why? Today’s executives do not want that because, in truth, they are lost. All that matters to them is the stock price and that metric is rapidly divorcing itself from the PE ratio which grounds them in truth. The stock market has degenerated to a less interesting version of Las Vegas controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy men. 

Personally, another threat I see daily is the use of AI to manipulate people. LLMs are extremely adapt at exploiting our cognitive weakness and to encourage us to alter our behavior often time in ways that are not in our best interest., LLM powered marketing models, games with in ap purchases and funding raising models are examples of potentially dangerous and explosive uses of AI.

As the world gets more chaotic and depersonalized is it any wonder that students use chat bot to do their homework (what is the point of homework if an AI will take your job) and as a surrogate friend (the AI is ever pleasing and less difficult than a human who is also suffering through our current dystopia). AI is like an addiction, by using it the world gets worse and as the world gets worse we want to use it more. 

And there are those who see the world for what it is and think only AI can save it. They are pushed by hope. In many areas AI is a force for good. In medicine, education, risk mitigation and science AI can accomplish feats unachievable by any other means. 

But Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not alive. It has no motive. It has no soul. It just reflects us. It is a symptom, not a cause. And for everyone unemployed by AI (that includes me) another person is saved by its power to detect hidden risks (although it is unmeasurable the true balance of bad versus good actions caused by AI).

AI is a mirror of Humanity. A mirror only shows what something is, not what it should be.

As an Economist, who was trained brutally to hate government regulation, I now feel only through government regulations, especially in how displaced workers are treated, is the first step forward in dealing with misuse of this potentially catastrophic mirror. No country is a truly free market- it is naive to think it is. Regulation developed in an open and transparent governmental process, to protect people, is the best way to mitigate some of the harm the use of AI is and will bring.

But, this is a tall ask. Education, voting-with-your-wallet and developing AI tools to fight AI may be simpler methods to help. Everyone needs to be diligent online on be skeptical of anything virtual. We need to monitor how companies use AI can adjust our spending to reward this who act in our best interest. And, we need to take AI leadership away from big corporation and instead of the open source community lead.

Artificial Intelligence can be turned into a force multiplier for good and not a mirror that only reflects our ugliness.