“Calling for a Humorous Upgrade: The Right to Tinker with Artificial Intelligence”
“We Need a New Right to Repair for Artificial Intelligence”
“AI’s are complicit in the most tedious chores of knowledge work: analyzing human communications, cross-referencing databases, fetching and collating documents—all tasks historically performed by administrative assistants, paralegals, and data analysts. In other words, AI’s continue to learn from the tasks we hate, yet perform so well. While these AI’s automate away hours of work in every sector of the economy, those who rely on them are often clueless about exactly how they work.”
Push aside the linen curtains of ignorance for just a moment and consider the technology at your fingertips. Artificial Intelligence, your faithful digital butler, tirelessly whirring away on tasks you’d rather not do. But, isn’t it the height of irony that fewer mortals have any idea how this intricate machine operates? From spoon-feeding and babysitting Alexa to allowing social media algorithms decide their fate, Mars isn’t the only place humans are lost, it seems.
“Mature AI’s… are alien species brought to Earth and bred in captivity by the corporations that own them…The internal state of a mature AI is incomprehensible to humans. Yet we must live amongst them. The challenge of co-habitation starts to resemble the complexities faced by cryptocurrency miners and traders in a volatile market.” There’s a quiet poetry to this. One minute you’re happily swapping dog pictures in the break room, the next, you’re awkwardly avoiding eye-contact with the complex, otherworldly entity sitting next to you. Oh, the thrill of living in a technicolor world of AI!
Ever wondered, what if we could dig beneath the silicon skin of our AI companions? What if we could peel back the layers and understand the swirling vortex of code that powers their existence? Would you feel regret, amusement or would you simply lose yourself within the labyrinth? The mystery is tantalizing, isn’t it?
Before you let the panic set in and start digging up resources to prepare for Terminator’s Skynet, let’s have a heart-to-heart. (Well, as heart-filled as a conversation can be about emotionless supercomputers at least.) The AI ‘beasts’ we’ve nurtured in our professional playgrounds are still constrained by codes, laws, and policies. So, while the stability of cryptocurrency market might seem slightly more predictable than your AI tool decoding your weekly report, we still retain some control.
Finally, in case you weren’t already mentally crafting your “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords” speech, here’s the kicker: “Were an open standard for sharing training data to emerge…individual users could…participate in the improvement of the AIs they use every day.” It doesn’t sound quite as glamorous as piloting a giant mechanical robot, does it? However, it might just allow us more insight and influence into our artificially intelligent companions. As endlessly hilarious the prospect of cooperating with machines might sound, it’s worth a moment of consideration.
In the end, who needs the trudge of reality when the virtual world is teeming with AI anomalies, crypto-meltdowns, and other digital beasties? Co-existing in the shared universe of humans and AI might feel like an epic space odyssey, but let’s face it, isn’t it just a little bit exciting? After all, as they say, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity! Let’s just hope the aliens…um, AI’s, agree.