Views of Canadians on Artificial Intelligence,” a Nanos Research study delivered to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, in May 2021, included responses to the following question: How would you rate the impact of AI on Canada as a whole in the next five years?
In response (numbers rounded), 47 percent of respondents viewed the impact as very positive, 34 percent as neutral, 7 percent as very negative, and 12 percent were unsure.
The same survey asked Canadians for the level of their self-assessed familiarity with AI. Twenty-one percent responded that they were familiar with AI, 51 percent said somewhat familiar, 19 percent were somewhat not familiar, and 8 percent were not familiar.
So, although only about a fifth of us claimed to be familiar with AI, nearly ninety percent of us were quite happy to tell Nanos how it would affect Canada over the next five years.
Excuse me while I pull my hair out. We are at the forefront of the largest technological tsunami humanity has ever faced, and it’s moving so quickly that simply keeping up is daunting. Yet if we don’t try, I believe we will lose control of our options, and the freedom to achieve a balanced life may disappear for many of us.
End of rant. This column is not about how you or I should respond to AI, social media, biotech, etc. Rather, it briefly discusses three books available through our local library (also on various subscription services as audio books), which when combined provide a comprehensive review of the beginnings of AI and social media, how they became intertwined via algorithms, and where AI, AGI and synthetic biotechnology might take us in the future, including both benefits and concerns.
Extremely Online; the Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, by Taylor Lorenz, is focused on the growth of “influencers” on social media. The increasing entrenchment of AI and algorithms within the internet form the background. Her book-cover bio explains that she is “a former affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society,” among many other credits. Her book is current, published in 2023.
For those interested, Lorenz provides a fascinating array of historical anecdotes (e.g., YouTube started as a dating site) and social media characters (who can forget Paris Hilton?) to explain how individuals’ desire to share information publicly, first via vlogs and then by social media sites, begat influencers and the need for so many of us to seek validation through our online presence.
Influencing is a US $250 billion industry. Although it is a secondary theme, Lorenz documents detailed examples of how safeguards to protect users have largely disappeared as both content creators and platform owners do whatever they can to attract advertising and subscription dollars. By detailing the growth of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Tumblr, and other platforms, Lorenz shows how easily we can be coerced and misled by corporations and algorithms working in harmony. If one stands back from the book’s details, it is impossible not to be stricken by the magnitude of the shift in what so many of us, as internet and social media consumers, have been persuaded to believe is important in the world.
Lorenz shows how easily we can be coerced and misled by corporations and algorithms working in harmony
Terms of Service; Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection explains, in author Jacob Silverman’s view, how the increasing use of AI on the internet is structured primarily for mining personal data and surveillance, including facial recognition. Apparently Google Maps can now route us via our GPS devices to as to pass by specific roadside billboards, which have cameras embedded within them to confirm we viewed the advertising. Google then charges the advertiser accordingly. Seriously?
Two things especially attracted me to this book.
First, Terms of Service is easy to consume and enjoy by readers at any level, yet written to be detailed, informative and provocative, drawing a multitude of conclusions and cautions about where our AI-managed internet is taking us.
Second, it was written in 2015, eight years ago. If the argument is that AI is a technology advancing quicker than we can control it, what better way to draw our own conclusions than to read an eight-year-old book and compare its predictions to our current reality. It’s astonishing to realize that Silverman, with all his contacts, data and research, actually underestimated the advances we’re witnessing in AI development.
The Coming Wave; Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, written in 2023, is reassuring and/or terrifying. Everything you need to choose your camp is here.
The author, Mustafa Suleyman, is the co-founder of DeepMind, now Inflection AI, a world-leading AI company sold to Google in 2014. He then became Vice-President of AI Product Management and AI Policy at Google. His bio states, “When he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Suleyman dropped out to help start a non-profit telephone counseling service.”
This is the guy I want to explain the future of AI to me. Suleyman is a technologically gifted insider with a conscience and the ability to see, and communicate, the incredible benefits and risks AI presents in the shockingly near future.
The Coming Wave begins with a glossary, a simple tool that ensures the writer and reader are on the same page, no pun intended. For example, “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of teaching machines to learn humanlike capabilities. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the point at which AI can perform all human cognitive skills better than the smartest human.”
Suleyman covers the AI spectrum in an almost folksy manner, always respectful to promote the multitude of benefits—eradicating disease, improving agriculture, controlling global warming and many more—while clearly describing the danger: biotechnology allowing us to manipulate and control the core of living beings, machines that will become smarter than us, and the danger of sleepwalking or willfully ignoring AGI’s risks.
His basic premise is that containment, “The ability to monitor, curtail, control, and potentially even close down technologies,” is our best hope, and he describes a multitude of possible scenarios for why this will, or will not, be achievable.
Suleyman avoids technical jargon, as do all these books, and the scope of vision that frames his many discussions on where AI and AGI may or may not take us feels far-reaching yet honest, and not without humour. His prologue concludes, “THE ABOVE WAS WRITTEN by an AI. The rest is not, although it soon could be. This is what’s coming.”
I can’t lie. I skimmed a few anecdotes and repetitive sections, which shortened reading time. No firm answers were offered, but reading these books was my initial arming in the battle to sort facts from nonsense as AI disrupts our future opportunity to lead balanced lives.
