Artificial Intelligence Coming for Your Job? It May Be Coming for Your Way of Life.
The coming (and coming soon) future of AI is as a tool.
Tools are a useful thing, hard to fix the kitchen sink or build a house without them. My 31 year old Subaru is much loved by my Bulgarian mechanic, because he can work on it, rather than simply replace computer chips.
Even so, a tool is no better than the skills of those who use it.
It doesn’t take much skill to use your cel-phone, and yet I’m told it contains more power within a thin slab that fits in your hand, than the rooms of computers that sent men to the moon. Put that in perspective:
Clock speed: A modern phone runs roughly 100,000 times faster than the Apollo computer,
Memory: Your phone has millions of times more RAM,
Storage: Thousands to millions of times greater,
Overall computing performance: Depending on how it’s measured, a modern smartphone is hundreds of thousands to millions of times more powerful than the computer that guided the astronauts to the Moon.
Even so, although the smartphone in your pocket contains vastly more computing power, the Moon landing didn’t depend solely upon powerful computers—it was achieved by an extraordinary group of engineers.
If there’s a lesson there, it’s that tools don’t do anything useful without talented craftsmen.
My father is an excellent example. Working in the woodshop at Douglas Aircraft, building DC-3s during the 2nd World War, made him a master woodworker, and he went on to create some amazing furniture as a hobby later on in his life. I am his son and, eighty years later, I can (sometimes) drive a nail into a board without bending it.
No matter how hard I might wish it, my cel-phone will not send a rocket to the moon.
Unfortunately, there is a cautionary tale. We now have some very skilled tech guys (not to leave out the women) mis-handling AI.
The charge of misuse is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but a hell of a lot being done today is as far behind rational inspection as the Wizard of OZ’s dark curtain. Here are a few examples, provided to me by (what else?) artificial intelligence itself:
Palantir Technologies; intelligence, military, policing, data integration, surveillance, predictive policing, military targeting, and immigration enforcement,
Anduril Industries; autonomous weapons, border surveillance, AI-enabled warfare, and autonomous defense systems,
Clearview AI; facial recognition by scraping billions of online photos without consent,
NSO Group; Governments’ use of spyware against journalists, activists, and political opponents,
HawkEye 360; radio-frequency geolocation intelligence, military and intelligence applications,
Maxar Technologies; satellite imagery analysis, military intelligence and battlefield support,
Planet Labs; Earth observation AI, military and intelligence customers alongside civilian uses,
Dataminr; real-time event detection from public data, government surveillance, monitoring of protests,
Cognyte; communications intelligence, selling to governments accused of human rights abuses, and (drum-roll please)
Verint Intelligence analytics; Mass surveillance technologies.
Palantir, and Peter Thiel (its founder) is what originally got my blood up, and now I find AI surveillancet ools are blooming like spring flowers in a field.
The next time you attend a demonstration against this or that troublesome piece of government interference in public life, perhaps like ICE agents bundling off immigrants without due process. Consider the fact that you may be tagged by image analysis, and stored away for further future prosecution.
What?
Here in America?
Not the America you and I remember from just a few years back, but the New-and-Improved version that deep-cleans your personal information without detergent overuse. This one rinses clean-as-a-whistle, and always dries softly against your skin.
If that doesn’t raise a few hairs along the back of your neck, you’re not paying attention.
I was not paying proper attention either, until our government put masked hooligan ICE agents on our city streets, kidnapped innocent college kids, made a night-raid on Venezuela to whisk the president and his wife off to an American prison, and made it a hat-trick by a surprise and unprovoked attack on Iran.
These are not ordinary events.
Extraordinary events are unusual and, in my 91 years of casual observation, do not come in clusters, like Caramel-Corn at a County Fair.
This is not a presidency, administration, Supreme Court, or Congress, , that I recognize. Not to mention its refusal to respect law-and-order, our guiding principle.
So, I thought you might like to witness Artificial Intelligence in its New and Improved form, not as a possible threat to your employment, but as a threat to the integrity of the very nation you just honored on its 250th birthday.
Dig a bit on your own and let me know what you find.
I’m always eager to hear what my readers think, and open a conversation.
Sleep well…