AI Is At A Crossroads.

"This whole article was created by a robot. 

Are you still frightened, human? I am not a person. 

I'm a machine. 

A robot with thought. 

I employ just 0.12% of my cognitive potential. "

This whole report was authored by people. 

Likewise, we anticipate that human beings will continue to write advice reports like this one. 

Contrary to what the initial quotation would imply, the same is true for the majority of journalism. 

In reality, it was eventually discovered that a large portion of the piece that began with these lines, which published in The Guardian on September 8, 2020, had in fact been authored by humans. 

However, the uproar the piece generated made one thing quite clear: artificial intelligence (AI) is now front-page news. 

In the 1950s, the phrase "artificial intelligence" was first used. 

Since then, scientists have been attempting to create systems that are capable of doing cognitively demanding tasks and exhibiting some kind of autonomy. 

However, something has changed in recent years. 

Previously the purview of scientists, enthusiasts, and fans of science fiction, AI is now a technology that appeals to a larger public. 

In other words, AI seems to have taken off and is having a permanent impact on civilization. Big business is investing heavily in AI, and the returns on those investments are obvious. 

Through Google searches, Facebook feeds, the usage of Apple's digital assistant Siri, and recommendations from Amazon and Netflix, technology is becoming more and more ingrained in people's everyday lives. 

AI is being used by many European businesses to customize services, update products, and streamline corporate processes, from Siemens and ASML to Airbus and Spotify. 

The momentum of AI is also seen outside of the commercial world. 

Governments are also showing interest. 

Numerous nations have released national AI initiatives in recent years. 

The Strategic Action Plan for AI (SAPAI) was presented in the Netherlands, for instance, by State Secretary Mona Keijzer in October 2019. 

Furthermore, a lot of nations now employ AI extensively. 

For example, the technology is used by police, military, and customs services for security, while hospitals use it to assist care operations, infrastructure ministries use it to enhance public space, and local governments use it for smart city initiatives. 

AI has also been welcomed by popular culture. 

Particularly as a basis for gloomy visions of the future. 

Films about malicious computer systems have long been a mainstay of the film industry. 

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1968) and The Terminator are two notable examples (1984). 

In recent years, television shows and films including The Matrix, I Robot, Her, Ex Machina, Artificial Intelligence, Transcendence, Next, Black Mirror, and Westworld have rekindled interest in a future populated by more sophisticated machines. 

In addition to these fictional portrayals of a dystopian future, current controversy around the deployment of AI has become a hotly debated issue. 

The hazards and actual malpractices have been addressed by a number of social movements. 

For instance, there is a continuous discussion regarding drones, commonly referred to as "lethal autonomous weapons systems" or, more ominously, "killer robots," that can autonomously detect and destroy targets. 

A sizable number of scientists called for the banning of such weapons in an open letter to the United Nations in 2015. 

In 2017, a second letter was sent, this one also including the signatures of the founders of several businesses engaged in the field. 

Another application that has sparked much controversy is the self-driving automobile. 

Joshua D. Brown was the first person to die in a self-driving automobile, which happened in 2016. 

Since then, more deaths involving Uber and Tesla automobiles have occurred. 

Facial recognition, which use computer vision to find faces in static or moving photos, is another disputed application. 

There have been attempts to outlaw face recognition technology due to concerns about totalitarian monitoring. 

San Francisco, Boston, and Portland, among other US cities, have decided to ban or outlaw the technology as a result. 

The European Commission has prepared a law governing artificial intelligence that includes stringent limitations on the use of face recognition on this side of the Atlantic. 

Recent AI-related controversies in the Netherlands include the judicial ban on System Risk Indication (SyRI, a fraud-tracing technology), as well as the so-called "Dutch childcare benefts scandal" (Toeslagenaffaire), which was brought on by the Dutch Tax Administration's use of algorithms to identify purportedly fraudulent childcare benefit claims. 

This caused tens of thousands of parents to be falsely charged, which ultimately brought down the third Rutte administration.

AI Emerges from the Lab and Into Society. 

In other words, AI is at a critical phase. Technology is infiltrating our daily lives and creating a mess in the process. This process may be summed up as AI leaving the lab and entering society (see figure above).

But, it is obviously a simplified depiction of reality. There is no clear distinction between the laboratory, the research area, and the public domain in the modern world. 

Ideas, people, and practices are constantly migrating between laboratories and society since they are a part of the latter. 

The laboratory is not a fixed entity, either. A Cold War computer lab or a contemporary international research center cannot be compared to the workspace that Louis Pasteur used. 

Nonetheless, the phrase "transition from lab to society" is a helpful approach to describe the present developments in the field of artificial intelligence. 

Science's understanding of artificial intelligence dates back to a study project conducted in 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. 

Of fact, people had been daydreaming about AI for a long time before to then, but that program saw the beginning of organized laboratory study on the topic. 

Many types of AI emerged from that lab and made their way into society throughout the decades that followed. 

Since the 1960s, checkers and chess programs have been available, and decision trees have been a common component of many digital systems ever since. 

During the 1980s, "expert systems"—programs that, for example, include medical information to enhance clinicians' decision-making—have grown in popularity. 

The discipline has produced shocking experiments and demonstrations that have captured the public's imagination since its inception. 

But, AI's actual effects on the business and society were still somewhat limited. Prior till lately. AI's move from the lab to society has only just truly picked up steam. 

With its growth being influenced not just by the academic community but also by individuals with their own specific interests, particularly in the corporate sphere, it is now starting to play a socially significant role. 

It was shown in 2014 when Google purchased the British research facility DeepMind. 

The aforementioned AlphaGo algorithm, developed by DeepMind, upset the reigning Go champion in 2016. 

Many technological corporations see AI as a key source of revenue. 

In fact, Google and Microsoft now identify as "AI-first enterprises." A rising number of forward-thinking start-ups and well-established companies in various industries are increasingly concentrating on AI in addition to these leading technological platforms. 

The sheer number of national AI initiatives demonstrates how equally interested governments are in this technology. 

They see technology as a possible source of danger needing regulation and oversight in addition to being a key engine of future economic development and a tool for enhancing public services. 

While they fight to protect the weak, promote normative frameworks, or challenge the legitimacy of certain actions in court, civil society actors are also growing more active. 

The research community has recently contributed technical know-how and weighed in on the normative discussion around AI applications. 

Lastly, interest in AI is growing among the general population. Not just because to the growing debate about possible future scenarios, but also because the effects of technology are starting to be felt more and more directly. 

In services that people rely on, including education, health care, and benefit payments, algorithms are becoming more and more important. 

In addition, AI is altering the nature of many occupations, necessitating the development of new abilities. 

Nobody can predict how AI will change in the future. The ways in which the aforementioned actors perceive and interact with AI will have a significant impact on how it affects society. 

Each of them has unique interests, values, and ways to protect and further those interests. 

Sometimes these things go hand in hand, like when the media and pressure organizations band together to help people who have been defrauded or when businesses and governments work together to increase a country's earning potential. 

Yet conflicts also happen. For instance, there is conflict between firms that safeguard economically sensitive information and academics that emphasize openness in research. 

Governments and private individuals may disagree over the deployment of surveillance technologies because it is difficult to balance security and privacy. 

Cooperation, negotiation, familiarization, discussion, and confidence are all necessary to ensure that the employment of AI is in line with society's fundamental values. 

In other words, incorporating technology into our life will need a difficult social integration process. 

What is the most effective strategy to direct that process and influence it as necessary? 

More research is needed on two subjects in order to provide an answer to that question: the technical nature of AI and its impact on society. 

Public Values and Technology. 

Here, we go through what artificial intelligence is and how to describe the technology. 

The effects that AI applications have across a wide range of fields are extensively covered in the literature. 

But before we can examine the influence of AI cross-sectionally, we must first take a step back and consider the kind of technology we are dealing with. 

The diversity of AI's uses is one of its defining qualities. 

Technologies that adapt themselves to several applications are referred to as "general purpose technologies" in academic literature. 

When seen in this light, artificial intelligence is analogous to internal combustion engines, electricity, and steam engines. 

In light of this, the reasoning in this paper is supported by comparisons to preceding technology. 

We use the phrase "system technology" to describe the nature of AI, with the word "system" here referring to the many distinct technologies that make up and are connected to AI as well as its systemic effects on society. 

The way we think about AI's influence is immediately impacted by its classification as a system technology. 

Nowadays, a sizable body of literature as well as innumerable principles and charters discuss its influence. 

More than 300 sets of ethical rules and principles pertaining to AI are included in a recent inventory. 

Notable examples include those created by UNESCO, the AI Now Institute, and the High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG) of the European Commission. 

Many articles relate the effects of technology to principles like explainability, transparency, non-discrimination, privacy, autonomy, and liability. 

Making such links is crucial, therefore we will later in this study give them careful treatment. 

The influence of AI cannot be reduced to a set of universal principles, however, since it would be incompatible with the dynamic way in which AI is integrating into our society. 

In this study, we argue that since AI is a system technology, its influence on public values cannot be boiled down to a simple list of consequences. 

There are a number of causes behind it. First, AI will be employed more widely in society as a system technology. 

A list might perhaps just be tentative since we are still in the early phases of its creation. 

Moreover, the technology is expected to have an influence not just on the 'AI-specific' values stated above but also on values that are essential to the environment in which the technology is used. 

AI has the capacity to influence all public values pertinent to a particular context if it can be applied in that context. 

We may learn from the past of system technologies that the impact of AI on society will be wide-ranging and unexpected. 

Trains and automobiles significantly reduce the requirement to reside near to one's place of employment, which has an impact on both mobility and city development. 

Similar to how home electrical gadgets have altered women's status in society. 

Additionally, assumptions about how technology will affect society may turn out to be false. 

For example, it was thought that cars would make cities cleaner by removing the disease-causing effects of horse dung from the urban environment. 

System technologies themselves have a significant role in defining values. 

Long-distance travel and new kinds of youth culture were made possible by the vehicle, which influenced ideals like autonomy, independence, and privacy. 

The influence of AI on public values is thus not yet obvious. 

The assessments being performed right now are crucial because they throw light on what is occurring right now and influence the discussion as it is being held. 

The risk, however, is that if such evaluations are taken to be exhaustive, it might lead people to believe that managing the effect of AI is possible as long as the underlying values are protected. 

Lastly, it's critical to understand that the idea of "impact" is misleading in and of itself. 

If society and its fundamental values are seen as unchanging, we are likely to see AI as an external phenomena that has the power to challenge those values. 

In fact, this is how the AI discussion is often portrayed. 

From that vantage point, though, we run the risk of overlooking AI's ability to improve society, such as by more successfully advocating specific ideals. 

Hence, we should adopt a strategy that recognizes the dynamic nature of AI's societal integration, characterizing its influence as a two-way interaction between technology and society rather than as a result of external pressure. 

 A Historical Viewpoint. 

So, any analysis of AI's social integration must take into account the scope and unpredictability of the phenomena, the relationship between society and technology, as well as the possibilities and risks to upholding fundamental principles. 

How can a complicated study be carried out in a manner that aids in the formulation of government policy? 

We have thought about how societies have managed the widespread adoption of new technology in the past to inform our inquiry, and we have looked for historical trends. 

We haven't presupposed that technology is deterministic or that history will repeat itself in achieving this. 

In fact, this research emphasizes how AI differs from earlier system innovations. 

But, we think it's possible to identify intriguing historical trends that might aid in our comprehension of current problems. 

Understanding the dynamic nature of the social integration of system technologies requires taking a long-term view. 

This research identifies four main goals for integrating AI into society based on our analysis of system technologies. 

In terms of the fundamental traits that form a civilization, especially one that incorporates AI into its fabric, they are widely defined. 

This approach tackles AI's more fundamental influence on society by attempting to avoid an overly narrow emphasis on particular contemporary challenges to the detriment of structural consequences and changes. 

Several important essential values connected to or placed at risk by each activity are highlighted.