It always helps to be doubtful of the promises that people make to you when they have a financial interest in selling. I asked ChatGPT to tell me how it has improved peoples lives. Here is the list.
- Personalized digital experiences: Streamlined product, media, and service recommendations; virtual assistants in homes and on devices.
- Convenience in everyday tasks: AI-driven chatbots, predictive text, and smart home devices improving customer service and routine interactions.
- Shifts in the workplace: Automation of repetitive tasks, new skill demands, and career adaptations due to AI integration in various industries.
- Healthcare improvements: AI-assisted diagnostics, telemedicine, and wearable health monitors for more accurate and accessible care.
- Enhanced navigation and transportation: Better route optimization, traffic management, and early autonomous driving features aiding daily commutes.
- Data privacy and bias concerns: Growing public awareness of personal data use, calls for ethical AI standards, and scrutiny of fairness in AI-driven decisions.
- Cultural and educational changes: AI tools in classrooms and broader public discussions about technology’s role, ethics, and impact on society.
Now lets analyze this shall we?
- We had personalized digital experiences before AI. Both human and programming created the ability to identify trends, and to find things that people would like. Google was made popular because its ability to identify what people found find valuable. We had AI and virtual assistants before the current crop of LLM and AI was available. We always had these.
- I don’t see the convince in everyday tasks. Chatbots take more time to talk with than a real human. I have used many of them and they are incapable of understanding basic things. Call centers and voice interactive systems have the same problem. Corporate systems never understand what the average person is asking the computer/AI/programmed menu. Predictive text is a joke. Apple devices rarely get it right, and most other predictive texts are useless like Microsoft Word or other systems. It makes you sound like everyone else to use that lazy way of writing. Smart home devices? I have stayed away from smart home devices because they give away your personal privacy and whose convince is that? Not the average person.
- There have always been shifts in the workplace. Every company wants to do things cheaper and to reduce the things that can be reduced. AI has made peoples jobs redundant by degrading the quality of the product/service. AI copy writing is garbage. It may communicate the facts, but it doesn’t communicate the spirit/intention. We have moved from a society that was built on community, to one that is built on the thinnest of strings. A paycheck.
- Some AI improvements have lead to increases in health and diagnostic work. It has also lead to a record number of denials by health insurance companies. AI is used to deny care as much as to help people. I have tried telemedicine and it is a joke. I have talked to doctors remotely and they said they couldn’t help me and refunded my money. What a waste of time and confusing for patients to even try this. Those wearable health monitors are now reason for your health insurance company to deny you care. Just like monitoring in cars from your car insurance is a reason to try to find fault with the person using it, and increase their profits by blaming you. AI isn’t helping us, it is hurting us.
- You know what would help enhanced navigation and transpiration? Not having to go to the office to sit on a Zoom meeting that could be done from home. I shared a study that shows that WFH and hybrid work is what people want. But instead someone who doesn’t have to deal with a family, perhaps a disability or limited resources makes a decision that hurts everyone. I bet that transportation would be enhanced when we have communities that are not food deserts, when we don’t red line districts, when we don’t allow racism/tribalism to make our decisions.
- Oh yeah this is encouraging. Microsoft and other companies fire their AI ethics departments while they push out AI without any limits whatsoever. We can’t trust companies that aren’t dedicating to questioning and policing themselves. We talk a good game, but the reality is that when companies aren’t forced to do something by law, they treat people as bad as they can legally get away with. Then when they abuse people, they sue the people to intimidate them so they don’t stand up for their rights. This is AI ethics? Killing the messenger?
- Right. As if poor education was crappy enough, now we are letting machines babysit young minds because we have decided it is more important to give high salaries to athletes and celebrities instead of teachers? If we cared about education, then it would be the highest paid occupation. Our values show where our dollars go. What do you think will be the result of people raised by computer, unattached to community, frustrated with our way of life? Is this a recipe for a thoughtful future?
We are making the worst possible choices in every sense in our lives. Why are we so committed to self-destruction on a personal and societal level?