Is AI Politically Insensitive or Astute

We all realize the world we live in is driven by political correctness and political expediency. Hard decisions requiring sacrifice are simply not on our political agendas, community agendas nor certainly in our national priorities. The prevailing mantra is that we will solve the world’s problems using intellect, our collective wealth, and by banning fossil fuels, which no knowledgeable energy professional will openly agree with. No one seems to want to pay any attention to the elephants in the room screaming we can’t get there with continual and expanding growth in consumption.

Now we hear that AI is going to solve problems that have eluded the greatest minds for decades including how to solve the footprint civilization has on the planet. Sure, we will hear from the magic AI code that microgrids, micro houses, and micro cars are important ideas, but the code, if honest and politically insensitive is going to produce this result:

“The human species is on an unsustainable and irresponsible quest to provide endless uses of raw materials and energy to sustain irresponsible goals that everyone on the planet must come up to the modern standard of living of the major cultures on the planet. It is politically unacceptable to face the options that truly solve this problem, so the only near-term answer seems to be to continue to delude the citizens of the world that there is such a solution without restraint and sacrifice. Either limit the population of the world or limit consumption.”

Pundits claim the latest generation of AI tools can learn on their own and that this does raise the concern that they could start generating answers no mere mortals can understand. As a developer of AI tools for about 60 years, I will let you in on something. Code that supposedly learns on its own will undoubtedly start to produce answers that are politically unacceptable.

Just look at the recent shifts in European countries and even in the US about who can and should enter. Think about the shrinking populations of the supposedly smartest countries on the planet and where the growth in world population is coming from. Then, look at the list of atrocities committed by previous and current world leaders about how they want to solve these problems. Then, remember that all AI systems require “training sets” to give them the optimization logic of how to solve problems. All of history is now being coded into these AI algorithms. Do you really think AI is going to come up with something comfortable if and when asked to solve these problems?

Movies like Hunger Games, Ex Machina, Her, and a host of others will look like child’s play if AI is let loose to decide what we need to do because we as a society are not ready to hear we are on the wrong paths. We still have time, but not a lot of it.