Negative Impact of Artificial Intelligence

What are the negative impact of artificial intelligence?

Someone who’s written the best-selling book on artificial intelligence. I often get asked, “What are the negative impact of artificial intelligence on society, on our world?” . And there are definitely a few. They can all be managed, but in this lesson, I want to take you through them.

Impact on Jobs

Jobs. We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that artificial intelligence will take away some jobs. And it will transform almost every job on the planet. So, we are now able to automate more things. We can replace what humans are doing today. From warehouse workers to security workers, to receptionists, to call center workers, to doctors, to lawyers.

negative impact of artificial intelligence

So, it’s not just physical labor; it’s also white-collar work that is being replaced. It will also create new jobs. So, lots of people believe that it will actually create more jobs than it will replace. There was a study by PwC, one by McKinsey, and so on. That all say actually we’ll have more jobs in the future, but different jobs. So, there’s an impact in terms of people having to retrain. They have to understand the impact of this technology on their own job, and it’s everyone’s responsibility to do this.

I have some concerns that there will be certain jobs. Where people will find it very difficult to develop the new skills that will be needed in this new fourth industrial revolution that we’re entering at the moment. But everyone needs to do this, and there will be an impact on jobs.

Bias in AI Systems

The potential to have biased AIs. As we outsource more and more of our decision-making to artificial intelligence. We need to make sure that they don’t produce biased decisions. Because we have too many of those already in our world. AI is already being used in offender management systems in the US. Where they are now making autonomous decisions whether to grant parole to offenders or not. And we have to be very careful that the data we’re using to feed these systems isn’t biased.

In healthcare, for example, if we are building an AI to make a decision about who to give a kidney transplant to, and our only criteria is to say we want to maximize the lifespan of the person that will receive the kidney. Then we might bias against African Americans because what has been shown is that they have a slightly shorter lifespan than other ethnic groups for lots of different reasons that are completely unrelated to health. So, if the system was biased, it might overlook those certain groups.

Amazon has had similar challenges where it started to introduce biases into their own recruitment processes to actually prefer male over female workers. They have now addressed this, but this is something we need to do. We need to really figure out what is the data that we are using to train our algorithms. And how do we make sure that the decision-making in our algorithms doesn’t replicate some of the biases that we already have in society. And actually, this is an opportunity because we can make sure that we address those biases and create better, less biased decision-making in the future.

Filter Bubbles

Filter bubbles. This is another challenge linked to biases. What happens now is that AI is very good at pattern recognition. We see this on Amazon; it can really recommend products to us that we might like or not like. But it’s also used in social media. So, if you like certain content, Facebook and other social media sites will probably serve you more of that content. And this can filter out content that might give you and might help you to create a more rounded picture of the world.

If you are really conservative, then they might give you more conservative content. And therefore you might miss a more unbiased worldview and a view that might challenge you and some of the underlying assumptions. So, this is again something where we need to reflect on and say, do we want to have these systems really optimized, or do we want to give people a more balanced view of the world?

Loss of Human Connection

Missing the human touch. As we automate more and more of our processes, sometimes we just need this human-to-human interaction. We see this when we ring a call center and we have a big problem, we have a big complaint to make, and we all know that we sometimes need to speak to a real person that can empathize with us and help us solve this problem.

What we are seeing at the moment is that chatbots are getting better and better, and the better they get, the more difficult it will be to actually get hold of a human being and to have this human connection. And this could change the way how we feel about being human. Sometimes you think about this already when we have conversations with our devices, like our smart speakers, our smartwatches. Do we really say thank you? Do we have the human-to-human level conversations, the emotions?

And the more we automate, the more we give to AI, the less of this we will have in the world. And what we need to make sure is that we protect some of this and really value the human-to-human interactions, but only when it is really needed.

Autonomous Weapons

A very serious negative impact of AI is autonomous weapons. What we now have is we have drones that can fly themselves into a different country, detect targets, and kill someone. We even have micro-drones that can work together and deliver explosives using face recognition to identify the exact person they want to kill.

This has huge implications, and there’s a big backlash against autonomous weapons at the moment. Lots of people have signed petitions saying we don’t ever want to see them. At the same time, we are seeing countries like the US, the UK, China, and Russia all working very hard on creating autonomous weapons. And this, for me, is definitely a negative impact of this technology.

AI and Terrorism

AI terrorism. You might argue that countries use autonomous weapons to protect our way of life, but this technology can be exploited by anyone. So, these technologies don’t know who their master is. Terrorist organizations and criminals can use this in the same way, and they can leverage this autonomy of these systems to drive automated attacks, physical attacks, or cyberattacks that threaten our way of life across the world.

Environmental Impact

Environmental impact. Sometimes we feel that these artificial intelligence systems, when they are behind apps that we’re using on our smartphones or they are driven on cloud computing systems that we use on our desktops. we don’t see them as having any impact on the environment.

What we have to realize is that they are driven by huge server farms. That sometimes take the sizes of multiple football fields that need to have a lot of energy that need to be cooled. So, they’re consuming vast amounts of data. So, we need to make sure that we use AI for something that actually makes our world a better place. And not just because we can, because it has an environmental impact.

Automated Hacking and Cyberattacks

Automated hacking and cyberattacks. AI and machine learning can now be used to drive attacks onto our computer systems. So, we have these denial-of-service attacks where lots of computers automatically attack one network. For example, or one website, and these can be automated using AIs. AIs are also becoming increasingly good at phishing attacks. So, when they send us an email saying this email is from your bank. This email is from Amazon or eBay, they basically learn what sort of phrasing we need to put into those emails to make us click on this.

So, in the same way that machine learning can learn anything. It can learn those things as well, and it is increasingly used by cybercriminals to automate their activities.

Conclusion: Balancing AI’s Impact

So, these were my negative impact of artificial intelligence on our world. But what you have to remember is that the bad, the negative use cases, are literally the flip side of the many positive use cases. As someone that works in the field, I see many more good cases for AI . Where it is really helping us to make our world a better place, delivering better education, better healthcare, producing better jobs in the future.

So, we have to be very aware as a society. We need to manage the negative impact of artificial intelligence but really leverage AI to make our world a better place.