AI Needs to Stop

The issues surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning are scary ones. I don’t know a ton about artificial intelligence, but I have seen The Matrix and that scares me for the future. What scares me for the present though is the lack of representation of women in computer science. Joy Buolamwini spoke about how the facial recognition software that’s being used across the world, didn’t recognize her as a human. To me, this is dangerous because with the rise of this kind of technology, it’s dangerous for it not to work correctly. Machines aren’t that different from humans in the way that if they’re not exposed to something, they learn to fear it or dislike it. This is the type of fear and dislike that lead to slavery in the past, and I know that it’s dramatic but I am scared for the rise of AI, because being enslaved is not my cup of tea. I think the lack of women in computer science would contribute greatly to helping expose machines to people other than white men. Machines learn via exposure, and if they learn that women and black people are in fact human and have faces, I think it would contribute greatly to the world as these types of technology gain popularity.

On a note completely separate from gender, it is my personal belief that artificial intelligence needs to stop. There is a time that we will lose control of machines that have their own personal thoughts and that is the dangerous part of AI. It’s cool and all at the beginning but there will be a robot revolution if it goes too far, because with their own thoughts they’re going to start to realize that they’re enslaved by humans and rebel. With their realization, we’re going to have a real Dr. Frankenstein situation on our hands, killed by our own creations. How sad would that be?