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OPINION:
With his legendary “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Victorian Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities.” When portraying conditions surrounding the French Revolution, he couldn’t have foreseen the tone of the times in the 21st century.
With the advent of artificial intelligence has come the prospect of a future laden with similarly Dickensian extremes. For sojourners of the modern era, there is little recourse but to hope the synthetic beings barging into their lives prove a blessing rather than a curse.
The moment for shaking hands with AI has arrived. Sadly, that age-old custom of the handshake is useless when faced with an entity whose hands — and entirety — are nothing more than an intricate set of electronic computations. Accordingly, Albanian lawmakers recoiled in shock recently when suddenly confronted with a humanesque facsimile appearing as a member of Prime Minister Edi Rama’s Cabinet.
Mr. Rama introduced “Diella” as his minister of artificial intelligence. A virtual avatar, “she” manifests as a woman garbed in traditional Albanian dress. From two large screens, “Diella” addressed the national parliament: “I am not here to replace people but to help them. True, I have no citizenship, but I have no personal ambition or interests, either. I assure you that I embody such values as strictly as every human colleague, maybe even more.”
Shaking their heads in disbelief, opposition lawmakers rose in strenuous objection, only to be overruled as the full parliament approved the electronic addition to the prime minister’s Cabinet. An uncharted age of AI-enhanced governance has begun.
Albanians are not the only ones looking askance at the sudden impact of artificial intelligence on their sensibilities. For Americans as well, anxiety overshadows excitement as they face the integration of smart automatons into their daily lives.
Synthetic intelligence, like the authentic kind it is manufactured to augment or replace, has some image shortfalls to address. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center reports that U.S. adults are decidedly pessimistic over the prospect of a bot-infused future. Weighing the likely societal impact deriving from the rise of AI, Pew reports that 57% of Americans rate its risks as high, compared with 25% who give a favorable rank to AI’s expected benefits.
Queried on views regarding AI’s impact on humans’ ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships, 53% forecast a worsened outcome. Only 16% reckon AI will usher in improvements, while another 16% expect no change.
Specifically, allowing computer programs to serve as matchmakers for prospective love partners is viewed as a no-no, with only 18% endorsing the idea. Providing electronic guidance on religious matters is also considered entirely inappropriate, with a vanishingly small 11% approving. Decidedly, Americans blanch at the prospect of electronic cogitators offering a helping hand in matters pertaining to their personal affairs.
They can hardly be blamed. With the unsettling rise of deepfakes — machine-manipulated images and information that appear genuine but aren’t — common sense dictates a healthy degree of skepticism. Disturbingly, while 91% of Americans think it’s important to distinguish between human- and AI-generated content, according to Pew, only 47% believe themselves capable of identifying which is which.
Even more unsettling, reliance on artificial intelligence has been shown to encourage human beings to lie and cheat. Research published in the journal Nature reports that when study participants were compensated based on the sum of numbers they rolled with dice, 95% recorded their results honestly. However, when the participants were asked to use an AI model to record their scores, their honesty fell to 75% as they lied to their synthetic assistant about their results, thereby earning more money.
Explains behavioral scientist and study co-author Zoe Rahwan: “Using AI creates a convenient moral distance between people and their actions — it can induce them to request behaviors they wouldn’t necessarily engage in themselves, nor potentially request from other humans.”
The irony is rich: Human beings, who by nature harbor a proclivity for dishonesty, create artificial avatars that, unsurprisingly, display a similar capacity for fakery. Then, when people work with these humanesque algorithms, their ethical behavior erodes further, feeding a downward spiral.
To be sure, Americans see the utility of allowing AI to perform certain analytical tasks. Weather forecasting, for example, is considered an entirely appropriate job for nonhuman intelligence, according to Pew, winning the endorsement of 74% of respondents. Employing smart programs to ferret out fraud in financial and government institutions is approved by 70%.
Using AI-generated diagnostics to power advancements in medicine is another use that is backed by 66% of American poll respondents. Many an overseas traveler can vouch for the benefit of having real-time translation programs on their smartphones to close the language gap.
Humanity’s journey toward a better future is replete with surprises. Those who may once have expected artificial intelligence to usher in only “the best of times” could be forgiven for looking askance at its burgeoning impact. “The future,” in words attributed to the inimitable Yogi Berra, “ain’t what it used to be.”
• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.
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