Is artificial intelligence something that should be embraced or feared? Do

you believe in the hype?

I think it’s first important to realize the inherent biases I have because of who I am and the path I’ve chosen

  1. As a child of a middle class relatively well off family, I’ve never personally experience the struggle or pain of a family member losing a job due to automation or AI.
  2. As a student at the University of Notre Dame, I know I will be well taken care of by the Notre Dame family, even if I go through some tough times.
  3. As a Computer Science major, I am prone to see the benefits behind new shiny technologies (especially if I’m working on them), without much fear of the negatives. Even if automation is taking away jobs, I am confident that it won’t be my job that is lost.
  4. I am currently taking Walter’s AI class, and have seen just how powerful modern AI can be in certain contexts if deployed properly.

These biases are tricky to work with to extract the full picture, because I am but a single actor, with my own goals and agendas. Thus strictly from a personal, selfish modality, I completely embrace the hype behind AI and new technology as a whole. I love working on automation tools. It’s so satisfying to see a massive increase in efficiency help the company solely because of my work.

Even this this in mind, I can definitely see where Andrew Yang is coming from in his campaign. He has seen the raw impacts of automation on hardworking families. Many of these jobs are lost because of people like me, who see the efficiency to be gained, and try to solve a system of equations to minimize ‘wasted’ human effort. Individual human lives are rarely a factor in these equations. At the end of the day the people putting these systems in place need to be aware of the lasting impacts of their decisions on all parties, not just their own satisfaction or a small revenue increase across the company.

With these costs in mind, I believe the potential extraordinary benefits make AI worth pursuing as a whole. Professor Scheirer has talked about some amazing strides in the realm of biologically inspiring neural networks within the past few years. Some of these advances are absolutely incredible, and will have overwhelming ramifications in many medical and healthcare related fields in particular as they continue to develop. AI played a major role in the process of mapping a full connectome for a simple C. elegans worm. What took over 20 years to complete in the 1960s was completed in a matter of months in 2019 due to enhanced guidance from various computer vision algorithms (along with other advances in technology). The 2019 study would not have been possible without all this automation. This is an example of automation spurring research onward by enabling new and exciting things by increasing efficiency and tractability of previously seemingly infinite problem spaces. I believe thinking about AI in this light is one of the best ways to maximize utility provided by AI, while minimizing other possible detriments.