Bias, discrimination, privacy violations, lack of accountability — AI entails a lot of ethical problems. Hyping AI creates additional ethical challenges on top of the existing ones, writes Dorothea Baur, founder and owner of Baur Consulting, and an expert with many years of international and interdisciplinary experience in CSR and sustainability management.
1. We do not need AI for everything: The AI hype epitomizes the belief that we need AI for everything, or at least that AI makes always sense. It does not question the very purpose of AI.
Yet, there is a lot of what I call ‘AI for nonsense’. ‘AI for nonsense’ is an antithesis to the ‘AI for Good’ rhetoric. AI for good strives to serve a meaningful purpose and is popular especially in the area of sustainability. ‘AI for nonsense’ is a term that comes to mind whenever I read about some AI ‘innovation’ where any evidence of real progress is missing. AI for Nonsense’ distracts resources from real-world problems.
2. AI cannot solve our most wicked problems: Not surprisingly, AI hype is also linked to misleading promises. This becomes evident when we hear claims like ‘AI will end poverty’, ‘AI resolves climate change’, etc… Unfortunately, such misleading promises can often be found in debates about ‘AI for Good’. They are often linked to a ‘technological solutionist’ mindset, that is, the belief that even the most wicked problems can be resolved with technology.
3. Hyping AI clouds its impact: Even though I’m critical of an excessive or exclusive ‘impact orientation’, which in itself is a hype, at least in the realm of sustainable investments, in the case of AI, some matter-of-fact impact orientation would be helpful. ‘AI hype’ is pretty much the opposite of such thinking, particularly in scenarios like those presented by Elon Musk with brain implants that merge human brains with AI.
4. AI hype downplays human contribution: AI hype is also part of stories that exaggerate the capabilities of AI in the present when effectively humans are still doing most of the work — we have all heard about the thousands of ghost workers who are manually labeling data to feed algorithms under dire working conditions. So, presenting something as machine intelligence when it’s actually human intelligence, is also dishonest and it deprecates the humans doing the real work.
The true value of AI does not lie in outsmarting or re-configurating humankind. The true value of AI lies in increasing our understanding of real-world problems whose complexity overwhelms the human mind. This is where we should direct our attention and resources, not to unfounded ideas of utopian thinkers or doomsday prophets.