Are We Biased Against Artificial Intelligence?
By: Sudipto Chanda
Tags: Fear, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence, Unconcious Bias, Social Media

Imagine walking into a coffee shop, bar or a restaurant. You vaguely remember your last visit, and you definitely don’t remember what you ordered last time.

One of the staff members walks up to you and welcomes you by your name, asks whether you would like the same drink as you ordered last time, and offers you your preferred seat by the window.

You feel important. You rave about the customer service of this place and probably plan to visit soon.

What if, the staff member was a robot? Won’t you feel creepy that your information was stored in some hidden place? Won’t you feel an invasion of your privacy?

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Why do we mistrust intelligent machines?

We don’t yet have robots roaming among us, but we have artificial intelligence infiltrating our lives through our smartphones and smart devices, more than we care to perceive

On the one hand, every tech giant serving us a Siri, Alexa or Cortana is assuring the highest level of privacy, while on the other, we are being bombarded with movies or TV shows scaring us of the impending doomsday where robots will take over the world. The shows are too numerous to list, but goes back decades. We can’t forget Skynet (Terminator, 1984), The Machines (The Matrix, 1999), or the HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

News of Alexa laughing randomly, spread chills throughout the world, and Facebook had to shut down AI robots after they started talking to each other. None of this reinforces our trust of machines.

Most of us encountered an imaginary villainous AI in cinemas, way before we interacted with actual AI such as Siri or Alexa on our smartphones.

The current generation will be better off but the onslaught of content showing AI taking over the world continues to be propagated on every streaming service out there, which ironically use AI to recommend these contents to you.

We must face our fears if we want to get the most out of technology — and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of humanity — Gary Kasparov (watch the TED Talk)

Should we blindly trust machines?

Of course not. But we need to be careful about biases, which are often unconscious.

Conditioned biases imprinted in our minds over time, become unconscious.

Such unconscious biases play out every day as we interact with people around us. Discrimination often stems from such biases which are formed by years of conditioning.

Awareness is all we can strive for

Unconscious biases are hard to deal with because they are unconscious (obviously). All we can do is to become aware of the conditioning that is going on for decades and apply our judgement to the situation at hand.

Many people complain that they don’t understand modern technology and yet, they use it every day. Wouldn’t it be better to be armed with knowledge and make an informed decision about your privacy?

Electricity was modern technology in the 1880s

In 1882, Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York introduced electric lights to parts of Manhattan. It took almost 50 years before electricity reached most households in the western world.

We don’t need to understand synchronous machines to use electricity safely. We know how to turn a light bulb or an appliance on or off, but we also know how dangerous electricity can be. As children, we learnt that we shouldn’t poke our fingers into a power socket. We also don’t go about pouring water on our bread toaster or dipping our hairdryers into our bathtubs.

Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

AI is here to stay

We will all encounter AIs more and more in our daily lives. Sometimes directly (AI assistants) and sometimes indirectly (AI resume screening).

Here are some AIs we frequently interact with:

AI Assistants Social media feeds Internet searches Recommendations on streaming services such as Netflix Recommendations on online shopping sites such as Amazon

If we want to live in the modern world and enjoy the wonders of technology and entertainment, we don’t have much choice but to accept intelligent machines around us.

Soon we will have self-driving cars, and drones will deliver our online orders, whether we like it or not.