The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Panopticon
False arrests with face recognition technology should be at the heart of the discussion of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses. Read this op-ed to learn more about the warped discussion of AI and the digital panopticon.
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon
Professor, Linguistics, UW // Faculty Director, Professional MS Program in Computational Linguistics (CLMS) // she/her // @emilymbender@dair-community.social
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There's a lot I like in this op-ed, but unfortunately it ends with some gratuitous ableism (and also weird remarks about AGI as a "holy grail").
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
First, the good parts:https://t.co/fUpbLSMDYb -
"[False arrests w/face rec tech] should be at the heart of one of the most urgent contemporary debates: that of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses. That it is not, and that so few recognise it as significant, shows how warped has become the discussion of AI,"
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
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"We have stumbled into a digital panopticon almost without realising it. Yet to suggest we live in a world shaped by AI is to misplace the problem. There is no machine without a human, and nor is there likely to be."
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
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"Too often when we talk of the “problem” of AI, we remove the human from the picture. We practise a form of what the social scientist and tech developer Rumman Chowdhury calls “moral outsourcing”: blaming machines for human decisions."
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
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So it's really a shame that the article ends like this: "It is not AI but our sense of fatalism and our blindness to the way human societies are already deploying machine intelligence for political ends that should most worry us."
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
There's no call to use "blindness" there.
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The overall point is a good one, and would be more effectively made by talkin about "inattention" (on the part of the populace) or "obfuscation" (on the part of those selling or using surveillance tech).
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023
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In case it isn't obvious why this is ableism --- it's equating blindness with lack of knowledge or inability to know. This is harmful and detracts from the point.
— @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon (@emilymbender) June 11, 2023