We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.
YES
I don’t think Ai Is going to go skynet. I know it’s going to be used to disenfranchise Black people, destroy creative fields, and generate mis- and disinformation because it’s already doing it
This is such an important distinction. Current AI is incapable of wanting to cause any of that harm, yet it’s already happening. The danger won’t be skynet, it will be and always has been human greed and ignorance.
Advocacy groups like the EFF and ACLU have been raising the alarm about the surveillance state for decades. It has very little to do with AI, and regulating AI will not likely have any effect on state-level abuse, because guess what? They already operate above the law and beyond reason. That’s the real problem.
We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include […] damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor […]
I got an example of that yersterday, when calling FedEx’s over the phone to schedule a pickup.
Contrary to calls I’ve made in the past, it was answered by a chatbot instead of humans. This raise various problems, in particular for already-disenfranchised people who rely on customer service being available over the phone.
- A disclaimer says “This call may be recorded for training purpose”, there was no asking for consent, no way to opt-out. Does that mean my voice and conversation will be fed into a database to develop DL/LLM AI systems? There’s no simple way to know, or to refuse without hanging up (ie opt-out = being denied service).
- The chatbot had a hard time understanding my inquiry, forcing me to repeat/rephrase it multiples times. In the end it replied it’s not possible to schedule pickups over the phone. This was possible back when humans were on the phone. Internet access is now required. Meaning disenfranchised people with no (easy/dependable) Internet are being left out.
- The chatbot used a generic greeting, didn’t introduce itself properly, and was evasive when I asked “are you a human?”. Not being forthcoming will confuse some old or non-tech-savy people who won’t easily realize it’s a robot, not a human.
