Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat to humanity?
Christian Pinales, Kaira Jimenez, Leslie Cabrera
Professor Brener
ENGL 21001
March 00 2024
This conference paper will address how Artificial Intelligence has the ability to bring great benefits, but it may also pose a major threat to humans in many ways. One of the reasons is job displacement. Artificial intelligence can replace human labor and would lead to consequences like low income, reduced hiring opportunities, scale down employees skills, etc. In addition, humans are becoming indolent due to being over-reliance on AI for issue resolution, which could affect humans in their critical thinking skills. Moreover, private infringement is a major concern since no one can suspect that AI can follow an individual movement based on what they are using, thereby compromising their privacy.
Diving into the world of artificial intelligence, or AI, feels a bit like opening Pandora’s box. At first look, it appears to be a world full of wonders: intelligent machines, self-driving cars, and gadgets that appear to know what we want before we do. There is a darker side, though. By using AI, we’re ceding control of our privacy and opening ourselves up to potential computer intelligence. It’s as if we’re raising an intelligent being that has the capacity to influence everything from our voting patterns to the things we purchase. The worry isn’t only about occupations being taken over by robots as these digital brains get more intelligent; it’s also about losing control. We may be creating competitors for ourselves in the form of these silicon-based intellects, ones that are unaffected by morality or compassion.
A struggle some college students have that revolves around artificial intelligence is plagiarism. Students cheat everyday and hurt their grades. Plagiarism is the art of stealing someone else’s work like music, papers, articles, etc(Dalalah, et al., 2023). Based on The false positives and false negatives of generative AI detection tools in education and academic research: The case of ChatGPT, it states “Because plagiarism involves exploiting another person’s work without their consent or appropriate acknowledgement, it can be viewed as a type of copyright infringement”(Dalalah, et al., 2023). The consequences of plagiarism are lawsuits, penalties, and fines (Dalalah, et al., 2023). Websites like chatgpt are runned by robots/ artificial intelligence which can be easily detected and noticed by anyone which causes you to fail the class completely and can lead to expulsion.
One of the most of this whole situation is how everyone in past generations couldn’t believe that technology can come this far. They used to believe nothing can replace their horses but they ended up replacing it totally. “The 1995 paper referred to Say, the famous French economist, who wrote in 1828 about the possibility of cars as substitutes for horses: ‘Nevertheless no machine will ever be able to perform what even the worst horses can – the service of carrying people and goods through the bustle and throng of a great city.’ Say could never have dreamed of, in his wildest imagination, self-driving cars, pilotless airplanes, Skype calls, supercomputers, smartphones or intelligent robots”. Nowadays there are multiple tools that minimize work efficiency. That caused society to change our ways we use our skills with one example being from riding horses to driving cars.
Although self-driving cars are dangerous, they still have some benefits to it. Machines do make less mistakes than humans do. They Were programmed to follow the law and drive safer than most humans do. Like stated here “ “Clearly, self-driving vehicles do not exceed speed limits, do not drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs, do not get tired, do not get distracted by talking on the phone or sending SMS or emails and in general make fewer mistakes than human drivers, causing fewer accidents. There are two implications if humans are not allowed to drive. First, there will be a huge labor displacement for the 3.5 million unionized truck drivers in the USA and the 600 thousand ones in the UK (plus the additional number of non-unionized ones) as well as the more than one million taxi and Uber drivers in these two countries” (from the scientist direct source). Ai can still have benefits to everything we do in the modern day, especially when we as humans make more mistakes than computers. But we can’t trust anything when we have no control over it. Like the saying goes “ computers have a mind of their own” and are very unpredictable as shown before.
With its potential of effectiveness and creativity, artificial intelligence (AI) has gained popularity and sparked talks about how it may disrupt a number of different industries. The future of employment and the stability of civilizations throughout the world are particularly in doubt due to the possibility of massive job displacement and growing economic inequality. Jobs might be replaced by artificial intelligence, which would lead to humans not working. In the article “Will AI be our biggest advance or our biggest threat?” states how AI has become a threat to people’s place of work, “formulate rules that would underlie hiring and firing decisions in the company. These rules could be revealed to workers, and if need- ed implemented into software for automated decision making. The decision-making software could be changed by managers proactively in anticipation of planned changes in the company’s strategy.” Therefore, AI will probably change the nature of work in the future by automating repetitive activities, which will eliminate jobs in certain areas while opening up new career paths in data analysis, AI research, and human-AI cooperation. Utilizing the full potential of AI while limiting its effects on job security and social inequality would require ongoing upskilling and the review of old employment arrangements.
Deep worries about global tracking and privacy violations have been raised by the addition of AI-enabled surveillance systems. This raises concerns about the possible abuse of personal data by businesses and governments alike, which calls for immediate debate about the ethical consequences and regulations required to protect people’s right to privacy in an increasingly linked world. In the article. “Threats by AI to human health and existence” states the many ways people’s privacy could be at stake, “This includes ensuring transparency and accountability of the parts of the military–corporate industrial complex driving AI developments and the social media companies that are enabling AI-driven, targeted misinformation to under- mine our democratic institutions and rights to privacy.” In order to successfully integrate AI, privacy problems must be addressed. We can take use of AI’s advantages while preserving individual rights and privacy by putting in place specific regulations and moral standards.
(A. Zilber, Creepy humanoid robot Apollo joins warehouse crews ‘moving boxes’ alongside real workers , New York Post, 5 Sept, 2023.)
The idea of robots rebelling against humanity and taking over the world sounds silly, but that doesn’t stop people from worrying that advanced AI could pose a threat. It has been said that large robotics are easy to control or shut down but nanobots could present a more challenging scenario. Nanobots are also known as nanotechnology; they are significantly used in medicine, research and environmental remediation; that is, fixing and cleaning up problems in the environment (T. Hausman, 2023) However, Nanotechnology’s capacity to consume all organic material on Earth underscores the urgency of considering AI’s ethical dimension. A lot of people are talking about Singularity which is a theory that people believe Artificial Intelligence can surpass human intelligence. In response to these concerns, proponents of “friendly AI” can assure people that the AI systems won’t harm humanity but prioritize human well-being. Eliezer Yudkovsky supports this idea and says we need to teach AI these values before it becomes more advanced in what he calls the “hard takeoff”. But others, like Ben Goertzel, believe we should argue for a more pragmatic approach; with a suggestion of a combination of pre-programmed values and experiential learning to guide AI towards moral behavior. Despite these efforts, the path to developing morally aware Artificial Intelligence remains uncertain. For example, teaching AI to be friendly to humans or building rules about morals into AI from the start. But some people doubt if these ideas will work, and they worry about unexpected problems, especially in areas of military robotics. Making robots feel emotion can bring opportunities and challenges, emotion could potentially enhance robots ability to understand people better but there can be worries about what might happen if robots act unpredictably because they don’t understand emotions well. However, people would argue about whether it’s right to give emotions to a robot, showing how tricky it is to balance technology on what’s right and wrong. From a technical perspective, making robots feel pain is complicated. and it could lead to unexpected actions that might not align with human expectations or values. This has been said by Ben Goertzel “Ben Goezrtzel does not believe that Yudkovsky friendly AI strategy is likely to be successful… Goeztrel concern is that being “friendly” to humans is not likely to be a natural value for an AGI and therefore is less likely to survive successful rounds of self-modification“. Even though emotions are important for humans to learn what’s right and wrong, giving them to robots might create more problems. And figuring out how to put limits on robots is challenging for future robot makers. If they can do this well, it can be possible to make robots that know what’s right and wrong and get support from the public for robots that can make their own decisions. Thus, the journey towards creating moral machines is complicated and uncertain, underscoring the need for ongoing research and thoughtful consideration of ethical implications.
Works Cited
CCNY Library Onesearch:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016328717300046
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.221159#d1e645
Opposing Viewpoint in context: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010899205/OVIC?u=cuny_ccny&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=07616e95
