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Two years ago, a New York company prevailed a “lawyer exclusion list” at its venues, including Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, resulting in a civil rights conflict. Using artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technology, MSG Entertainment identified corporate lawyers involved in litigation against the corporate and banned them from live shows, shows, and hockey and basketball games. As lawyers, after all they sueddenounced the ban as dystopian.
Not everyone has sympathy for lawyers, even in the event that they are prevented from seeing the Rockettes' Christmas spectacle. When tech entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman discussed this ban in a recent talk in London, a veteran CEO sitting next to me muttered, “Good.” But the incident clearly illustrates how our use of technology is resulting in messy battles over industrial interests , personal grievances, legal precedents and civil rights.
As Hoffman explained, such disputes are only the newest technology-enabled twists in centuries-old disputes over competing values. At least in democratic societies, in controversies over security and privacy, private profit and public good, individual freedom and collective interests, there are often opportunities to barter compromises, often in court. Such arguments are inclined to revolve around what the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative and positive freedom concepts. Berlin defined negative freedom as freedom from external barriers or constraints. He viewed positive freedom as the power to exercise individual agency and take control of 1's life.
As Berlin argued and Hoffman made clear in his honorary speech, these freedom claims are sometimes incompatible and sometimes incommensurable, meaning that they exist on different moral levels that can’t be measured against one another. The best that might be expected is an imperfect compromise that’s kind of acceptable to all parties. Democracy is a unclean but pragmatic business.
However, concerns concerning the increasing use of AI are that the technology could take away people's freedom of selection and talent to arbitrate such disputes by enforcing strict algorithmic rules. In his latest book, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari calls AI extraterrestrial intelligence since the technology is emerging as a brand new type of intelligence with its own impact. “AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity since it is the primary technology in history that could make decisions and develop recent ideas by itself,” writes Harari. Nuclear bombs cannot select where to drop them. Autonomous drones, alternatively, could determine for themselves who to kill.
However, Hoffman implicitly rejected Harari's alarmist attitude toward AI. Our tendency to fixate on how technology threatens the static present obscures the creative possibilities of a fluid future, he suggested. Instead of undermining human agency, AI could possibly be designed to empower it. Its purpose must be to empower people and provides them “super agency,” as Hoffman called it. The intelligent use of AI could give individuals “recent superpowers” that they will apply to their lives in unrestricted, inventive and personally relevant ways.
By using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, individuals could quickly acquire essentially the most useful skills, teach their children math, and evaluate complex terms in legal contracts. They would turn into smarter employees and higher residents, benefiting from a decentralized and distributed type of positive freedom and being empowered to pursue their very own paths. “I see tools like ChatGPT as a brand new type of informational GPS,” he said.
Hoffman's optimism is a welcome corrective to a few of the murky debates about AI. But some may additionally think it's delusional. Consider one other version of our technological future currently being built: China. A current report of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said it was only a matter of time before China caught up – if not overtaken – the US in AI. In some areas, resembling facial recognition technology, China may already be ahead.
The clear intent of the country's technology strategy is to empower the Chinese Communist Party greater than its residents. Some researchers have talked about this how China's highly intrusive AI-powered surveillance state locks people in an “invisible cage.” Depending on how we use it, AI is the enemy of freedom. As Berlin warned and Hoffman acknowledged, authoritarian regimes can abuse the rhetoric of positive freedom to impose their very own dogmatic interpretation of the collective good.
