The Prime Minister and his colleagues have been declaring their ‘freebies’ – so here’s my piece of transparency. This week, courtesy of one of the organisers who just happens to be our daughter-in-law, Ciorsdaidh, I got a free online ticket to some sessions of the Lovelace-Hodgkin Symposium on AI Ethics at Glasgow University. She and I had had a conversation after I attended a panel discussion on AI at Greenbelt Festival 2023 and one of the specialists at Greenbelt turned out to be very useful in Glasgow – so you could say I had made a minute contribution to the event!
I’m so intrigued by what I have heard that when Mike said, ‘you’d better write a blog about AI’. I agreed without really thinking!’ My mind is well and truly blown...so many questions!
First of all I have become more aware of how little I know about AI itself! Alexa doesn’t live in our house. I mostly forget that I can address Siri because on the few times I try, she tends not to be very helpful! Is it me or her? I ask myself! On an odd occasion I have seen a piece of writing generated by Chat GPT – but I wouldn’t give it very high marks in an exam! Probably our greatest reliance on AI is when we use the SatNav to find our way to unfamiliar destinations.
But clearly AI is here to stay and the first generation of children to grow up with AI bots as friends are among us. Parents ask, ‘What effect will this have?’ and, of course, nobody knows! Relationships like that have never happened before. Everyone is crawling along in the dark to who knows where with this new technology which seems to be moving ahead quite fast. Who really knows what the future holds?
One thing is certain, technology is never neutral; it is created by human beings who don’t work in a vacuum. These ‘techies’ must find an ethical framework by which to judge the success of their product. If AI is going to be available to and beneficial to as many people as possible, it needs to be created by ethical people. Unless ethical concerns for equality, diversity and inclusiveness are influential, AI will simply strengthen existing power structures in the world. If the means of creating it is the preserve of a select few who have no sense of responsibility to the public, and their prime motivation to make money for investors regardless, then AI will entrench powerful wealth, race, age, gender and abled hierarchies already dominant in the world.
All of which assumes that ethical frameworks both for the creators and the users of technology can be constantly developed by agile people who are both thoughtful and responsive to this fast-changing landscape. One educational administrator at the conference was talking about the need for the development of ethical literacy throughout educational institutions beginning in primary schools – and I thought, in their homes!
The picture of a future where AI is a more significant player in most of our lives has, until recently been the product of the minds of fiction writers. The question of who gets to imagine our future in a new world with AI seems important. Are we content with the pictures of either Utopia or technological apocalypse that have tended to dominate our science fiction and sensational media? Who gets to shape our imagination about the future of our society, who gets to, create the narratives of a world made happier by the new powers that AI can offer? What makes technology ‘good’? And who decides?
The academics in Glasgow have left me with more questions than answers!
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