One of the panel highlights at this year’s Youth BSF forum started off with a somewhat dystopic picture of the future presented by Filip Muki Dobranič, a philosopher and activist involved in civic tech, studying the effects of the internet on decision making processes. Looking at the future where AI will be “perfected”, Dobranic spoke of a disturbing gap between humans and “machine intelligence”, with the latter being incomprehensible to the former, which could present major issues. Dénes András Nagy, a civic technologist and the president of Talos, a civic technology start-up seeking to foster European civicism, later described this “black box” problem, the problem of not knowing how the algorithms in these new beings really work, as the biggest political issue as regards AI in the future. Political decisions on the related problems ahead – for instance with what decisions should AI be entrusted – will have to be taken, but this is being neglected, Nagy added. Lazar Džamić, a respected author and former head of brand planning in Google’s creative think tank ZOO in London, pointed out that AI, its first wave, is already very much present with for instance more than half of shares traded in the US being traded by AI algorithms. Pika Šarf, a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Ljubljana Faculty of Law who is interested in questions of law and technology, highlighted the issue of liability connected to AI, pointing out that for instance no insurance company will want to get involved.
Scores of other issues that arise as a result of AI were highlighted by the panellists, one of them being the gigantic investments into the field by countries like China and Russia, who see it as a tool for global dominance. Šarf pointed out that the EU is also falling behind here because it has very strong legal protection of data. “And data is the fuel of AI. On the one hand the EU is trying to compete and on the other it is trying to protect our human rights,” Šarf said. She touched here on surveillance and privacy issues that are also on the list of AI problems. Nagy raised in this context the dystopic prospect of China coupling its new social credit system with AI.
Another major reason for concern is the loss of jobs related to AI, first by the poorest. While Nagy pointed to estimates of a potential loss of 800 million jobs, Džamić highlighted the fact that this could require a complete shift in the economic paradigm, which is being considered in some intellectual circles, but being ignored by policy makers. “If a country that had an AI that is productive and created value – why do you have the work,” Džamić said, noting how rigid thinking is in this field and that a serious intellectual effort should be invested into this. Dobranič, who also highlighted the issue of control that could be exerted on “well-behaved” workers in a capitalist society as a result of AI, echoed Dzaimić’s views, but suggested that a blue-print might not be compulsory: “Nobody asks the capitalists to put forward a blueprint for the current system, everyone just believes,” he said. However within the current situation “we need to start devising systems of collective bargaining” related to deskilling and find ways to “manage these transitions without having massive societal upheavals”.
