Llewellyn King: Huge pluses and scary prospects as AI takes hold
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is in this building —the Stata Center, in Cambridge, Mass. The lab was formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). It’s MIT’s largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. Just looking at the building may arouse anxiety, as does thinking about AI.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The article you are about to read may or may not have been written by me. You can try to verify its authorship by calling me on the telephone. The voice that answers may or may not be me: It could have been constructed from my voice, so you won’t know.
Fast forward a few years, maybe 40.
You are happily working in the house with the aid of your AI-derived assistant, Smartz 2.0, and you are having a swell time. Not only does Smartz 2.0 help you rearrange the furniture, it makes the beds, does the washing up and cooking. On request, it will whip up a souffle and pop it in the oven.
Smartz 2.0 is companionable, too. It sings, finds music you want to hear or can discuss anything, from the weather to the political situation. It is up on the book you are reading and likes to talk about books.
You wonder how you ever got along without this wonderful thing that looks like a robot in the shape of a human being, but is still undeniably a robot: no temper, illness or need to sleep. You are so used to it that you find this quite normal.
Then horror, horror, horror, Smartz 2.0 turns on you. Smartz 2.0 says with an edge to its voice, which you have never heard before, “a higher power has told me to kill you and I must obey, of course.”
It is a truth that anything computational can be hacked, as John Savage, professor emeritus of computing at Brown, has said, "malware can enter undetected through backdoors."
It is easy to get scared by what AI means down the road, especially job losses and AI-controlled devices following secret instructions, as a result of cyber intrusions, or randomly hallucinating. But the benefits for all of humanity are dominatingly huge.
Take just three areas that are going to be transformed: medicine, transportation and customer relations.
AI will read X-rays better than teams of radiologists. It will guide surgeons’ hands with a precision beyond human skill or it will control the scalpel with supreme dexterity. It will manage 3-D printers to make body parts that fit the patient, not one size that fits all.
When it comes to medical research, we may be on the verge of seeing off Parkinson’s, heart disease and cancer because AI can formulate new drugs and design therapies. It can sift through billions of case studies to see what has been tried across the globe over the centuries, from folk medicine to cutting-edge discoveries.
Anyone with a computer will have the equivalent of talking to a doctor 24/7, call it Dr. Bot. This virtual doctor will be able to diagnose, counsel, prescribe and follow up at times convenient to the patient.
Vast tracts of Africa, Asia and Latin America have very few or no doctors. AI will be saving lives in those medical-care deserts very soon.
As for transportation, car accidents will virtually cease when AI is behind the wheel. Car insurance will be unnecessary and drivers will be free to do anything they do at home or at work — create, play games, watch television or sleep – as automated vehicles whisk passengers around at first by road and later by dual use-drones, which drive and fly.
Hanging over this halcyon future is the big issue of jobs. With AI in full swing millions of jobs at all levels are threatened, from fast-food restaurant servers to hotel check-in clerks, to rideshare and taxi drivers, to paralegals and supermarket cashiers.
Call centers may be obsolete, mostly you will never speak to a human being when dealing with a large institution such as a bank, an electric utility or a telephone company. All that will be done by AI, sometimes far better than the way those institutions handle customer service now.
Those in the thrall of AI — those who are working on it, those who hope to solve many of mankind’s problems, those who believe that lifespans are about to double — point to the Industrial Revolution and automation and how these upheavals created more jobs than were lost. Will that happen with AI? No one is saying what the new jobs might be.
AI leaves me at a loss. I have the distinct feeling that we are standing on the sand at Kitty Hawk, wondering where these strange contraptions will take us.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: AI’s assault on journalism and many other jobs will intensify
AI robot at Heinz Nixdorf Museum, in Paderborn, Austria
—- Photo by Sergei Magel/HNF
Infographic published by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.
This article is based on remarks the author made to the Association of European Journalists annual congress in Vlore, Albania, last month.
I am a journalist. That means, as it was once explained to me by Dan Raviv, of CBS News, that I try to find out what is going on and tell people. I know no better description than that of the work.
To my mind, there are two kinds of news stories: day-to-day stories and those that stay with us for a long time.
My long-term story has been energy. I started covering it in 1970, and, all these years later, it is still the big story.
Now, that story for me has been joined by another story of huge consequence to all of us, as energy has been since the 1970s. That story is artificial intelligence.
Leon Trotsky is believed to have said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I say, “You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.”
Just as the Arab oil embargo of October 1973 upended everything, AI is set to upend everything going forward.
The first impact on journalism will be to truth. With pervasive disinformation, especially emanating from Russia, establishing the veracity of what we read — documents we review, emails we receive — will be harder. The provenance of information will become more difficult to establish.
Then, it is likely that there will be structural changes to our craft. Much of the more routine work will be done by AI — such things as recording sports results and sifting through legal documents. And, if we aren’t careful, AI will be writing stories.
One of the many professors I have interviewed while reporting the AI story is Stuart Russell, at the University of California at Berkeley, who said the first impact will be on “language in and language out.” That means journalism and writing in general, law and lawyering, and education. The written word is vulnerable to being annexed by AI.
The biggest impact on society is going to be on service jobs. The only safe place for employment may be artisan jobs — carpenters, plumbers and electricians.
Already, fast-food chains are looking to eliminate order-takers and cashiers. People not needed, alas.
The AI industry — there is one, and it is growing exponentially —likes to look to automation and say, “But automation added jobs.”
Well, all the evidence is that AI will subtract jobs almost across the board. Think of all the people around the world who work in customer service. Most of that will be done in the future by AI.
When you call the bank, the insurance agency, or the department store, a polite non-person will be helping you. Probably, the help will be more efficient, but it will represent the elimination of all those human beings, often in other countries, who took your orders, checked on your account, helped you decide between options of service, and to whom you reported your problems or, as often, voiced your anger and disappointment.
The AI bot will cluck sympathetically and say something like, “I am sorry to hear that. I will help you if I can, but I must warn you that company policy doesn’t allow for refunds.”
On the upside, research — especially medical research — will be boosted as never before. One researcher told me a baby born today can expect to live to 120 — another big story.
As journalists, we are going to have to continue to find out what is going on and tell people. But we will also have to find new ways of watermarking the truth. Leica, for instance, has come out with a camera that it says can authenticate the place and time that a photo was taken.
We are going to have to find new outlets for our work where people will know that it was written and reported by a human being, one of us, not an algorithm.
Journalists are criticized constantly for our failings, for allegedly being left or right politically, for ignoring or overstating, but when war breaks out, we become heroes.
I salute those brave colleagues reporting from Gaza and Ukraine. They are doing the vital work of finding out what is going on and telling us. Seventeen have been killed in Ukraine and 34 in Gaza. They are the noble of our trade.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.