Concerns about inherent bias and risks of misinformation will hinder adoption of AI for some time to come.
Additionally, there are no immediate fixes for the damaging environmental and human cost of Big Tech’s AI drive, according to MIT Technology Review’s annual list of the top breakthrough technologies that will change the world.
AI has been on the journal’s list before, but now that it has gone mass market, the focus is on potential flaws in current models and practices.
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, publisher and CEO of MIT Technology Review, shared the publication’s view of AI in a featured SXSW session, “10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024.”
“We predict that there will continue to be workarounds developed as awareness continues to rise around the problem of bias — but it’s not going to be solved quickly or easily,” she said.
Expect more copyright lawsuits, too, but despite new policy protections and tech solutions that work to confuse an image algorithm before publication, “it’s going to continue to be a game of whack-a-mole,” she said.
The challenges of policing deepfakes and misinformation around the 2024 elections are another concern.
Bramson-Boudreau highlighted the difficulty of banning them due to their open-source origins or systems that are built by state actors and “so are out of the reach of control and can be impossible to trace. So, it’s going to be a very messy 2024,” she added.
Researchers believe jobs will change in scope but not necessarily in number, requiring retraining to adapt to AI-assisted work. Less well known, but arguably more important, is the lack of understanding about AI’s environmental and human costs.
Data centers require an awful lot of energy but it’s also costly for humans — specifically, the low paid workers in poor economies who are doing data labelling.
“This is an unseen part of the AI economy. They may be labeling hundreds of thousands of images of sexually explicit content, violent content, and abuse of children.”
Bramson-Boudreau lamented the digital economy, that is seriously damaging investigative journalism, the same journalism that previously would have shined a light on malpractice and gotten Big Tech to do something about it. “Despite a lot of pressure on tech companies to address AI’s human and environmental costs, major improvements are not expected soon,” she said.
The existential debate about whether AI is going to destroy us is not imminent and in fact, is an active distraction, MIT argues, from solving all the actual issues happening now: the human cost, the environmental costs, the bias, and the misinformation.
It’s not as if there’s any killer app for AI, Bramson-Boudreau concludes. Given all the serious problems AI is generating, she asks, “what exactly is AI good for?”
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