The leading stress factors in the foreign and technology policy worlds today are China’s purported edge in the race of artificial intelligence. The usual narrative is like this: the Chinese will outstrip the West. This is the main concern if liberal democracies fail to impose constraints on data collection, with the capacity to centrally direct higher resource allocation. Artificial intelligence is hungry for more and more data.
Nevertheless, the West insists on privacy. It said that we couldn’t afford that luxury. Thus, whichever world power first achieves superhuman intelligence via artificial intelligence will become dominant.
Thus, the Chinese advantage is powerful. Nevertheless, the term AI doesn’t underrate the specific technological advances. While artificial intelligence only references a subjective measure of the task that we classify as intelligent, a name like nanotechnology categorizes technologies by referencing an objective measure of scale. For example, the “deepfake” and adornment transformation of the human face, now standard on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, came up in a startup sold to Google by one of the authors. Such capabilities were image processing 15 years ago; nevertheless, now it is termed “artificial intelligence.” For that, one reason is marketing. Software is benefiting from an air of magic when its name is “artificial intelligence”. In case artificial intelligence us more than marketing, then it might be better understood as one of several competing philosophies that could direct our thinking about the nature and use of computation.
Artificial intelligence
The clear alternative to artificial intelligence is focusing on the people present in the system. In case a program can distinguish cats from dogs, do not talk about how a machine is learning to see. Instead, you should talk about how people contributed examples for defining the visual qualities distinguishing “dogs” from “cats” in a rigorous way for the first time. There is always an alternative way to conceive any situation in which artificial intelligence purports. That matters because the unnatural intelligence way of thinking might distract from the responsibility of humans.
AI might achieve unprecedented results in diverse fields, including language/image processing, robotic control, and medicine. It also can be a certain way of talking about software that might be in play as a way not to fully celebrate the people working through improving information systems that are achieving those results. Nevertheless, AI might become a threat to the human future. It is often a plot of science fiction. Or it can be a way of thinking about technology that is making it harder to design technology; thus, we can use it rationally and effectively. The very idea of artificial intelligence can create a diversion, which makes it easier for a small group of investors and technologists to claim all rewards from a widely distributed effort. An essential technology is a computation; nevertheless, the artificial intelligence way of thinking about it might be dysfunctional and murky.
You might reject the artificial intelligence way of thinking for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, the fact is that it has hegemony in technology and the world too.
