The New Empire of AI (eBook)

The Future of Global Inequality

Rachel Adams (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Polity (Verlag)
978-1-5095-5311-2 (ISBN)

Infos

As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it. As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire.

AI's impact on inequality will not be experienced in poorer countries only: it will be felt everywhere. The effects will be seen in intensified international migration as opportunities become increasingly concentrated in wealthier nations; in heightened political instability and populist politics; and in climate-related disasters caused by an industry blind to its environmental impact across supply chains.

We need to act now to address these issues. Only if the current inequitable trajectory of AI is halted, the incentives changed and the production and use of AI decentralized from wealthier nations will AI be able to deliver on its promise to build a better world for all.

Rachel Adams is the Founder and Executive Director of the African Observatory on Responsible AI. She sits on the UNESCO Expert Committee for the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the AI Safety and Ethics Committee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Multistakeholder Expert Group of the Global Partnership on AI. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cape Town.

Textauszug

1
A New World Order

It is 19 January 2016. Nestled in the valleys of the Swiss Alps, a small town awakes. The location is favoured for its high altitude and peaceful climate, offering respite to the indisposed and weary. On this day, leaders from around the world have descended upon the small town to sit in conference. One such figure is the founder and chairperson of one of the world’s most powerful lobbying groups. He is set to deliver an address that will change the direction of global policy in all corners of the world for years to come.

In his opening address at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss town of Davos in January 2016, Klaus Schwab announced the coming of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: a new world order driven by exponential technological progress. At the centre of this new world order, he said, is AI. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) was an umbrella term for the technologies and new social order that came after the Internet – a term that would eventually be replaced by just ‘AI’.

Over the next few days, country presidents and industry moguls met to deliberate about the future of work and education, global debt, the humanitarian imperative, and many other pressing challenges and opportunities facing the global community. AI was a constant refrain: these technologies would offer promising solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. ‘Imagine a robot capable of treating Ebola patients or cleaning up nuclear waste’, one participant exclaimed. ‘For people with a disability’, these technologies ‘will give us superpowers’, another participant marvelled.

Some months later, in a boardroom on the southern tip of the African continent, a CEO poses a question to some of the continent’s leading social scientists: ‘Who can tell me what AI and the 4IR are?’ My colleague answers that what we are facing is not a revolution, nor are its impacts confined to industry and the economic sphere, nor is it, sequentially, the fourth era of technological change that the world has faced. My own focus at the time was on human rights, particularly individuals’ right to speak, to know, and to keep their choices private; the technologies associated with the 4IR were very much impacting on these rights, as the saga of Edward Snowden and the scandal of Cambridge Analytica were reverberating throughout global debates. For many of us in the room, AI seemed somewhat removed from the African context, where our immediate concerns were about food security, decent housing, and violence against women.

The then deputy president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, had attended Schwab’s convocation in January 2016 and returned to the country with an imperative to integrate this new idea into policy agendas at the highest level. Our CEO knew this and was aware of the pressure to catch up with the world that South Africa was under. In early 2018 Ramaphosa had been elected as the fifth president of post-apartheid democratic South Africa. Quickly, he called for nominations to establish a presidential commission of experts and industry leads who should develop a national response to AI and the technologies of the 4IR, in the hope that such a response would promote the development of these technologies, which could then be used to advance inclusive economic growth in one of the world’s most unequal countries.1

Since the official arrival of the 4IR in South Africa with the establishment of the presidential commission in 2018, the country’s Gini coefficient – the most accurate measurement we currently have for understanding levels of inequality in a country – has in fact risen. The new technological revolution that pledged inclusive economic growth has, thus far, failed in its promise.

The story of South Africa’s response to the global agenda setting around AI is not unique among countries of the majority world. Davos catapulted AI from the status of a specialist field of computer science and a barely recognized tool of Big Tech to the status of global policy issue and opportunity. Political leaders and policymakers everywhere were pressed to consider ways of adopting this supertechnology in support of national social, economic, and political agendas. From 2017 onward, the publication of policy documents citing the benefits of AI proliferated. Countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Japan, or Italy all began investing heavily in the development of AI technologies, and the AI industry boomed. This development was always couched in language that presented it as a global opportunity, a promise at the feet of humankind, a way to step into a new world space of ease, efficiency, and fulfilment made possible by a benevolent yet submissive digital intelligence – an intelligence that was able to attend to human and societal needs even before they were articulated. This new technology would deliver us from our most intractable challenges. Its promise was utterly alluring, particularly for nations across the majority world who faced deep socioeconomic challenges – and we will not forget, over the course of this book, the historical conditions that shaped these challenges.

The narrative of AI’s promise to all humanity had two major limitations. First, it functioned to hide the fact that the development and use of AI were not driven by public interest, global consciousness, and compassion for humanity’s progress, but by profit. The hands guiding the advancement of AI research and its application were those of Big Tech: Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company, and now DeepMind’s too), Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Alibaba. But the claim meant that no one would question its development. Even if the benefits of this technology have not become manifest for everyone yet, that was only a matter of time, it was thought. The second limitation, which is closely related to the first, is that those nations that could not keep up with the rate of technological progress would be left behind in the new global order of progress and power.

But what about those nations? What benefit does AI hold for the countries in which the majority of the world lives? What does it mean to be left behind?

Over the course of the next two chapters we will understand how the gap is widening and how the majority world is being left behind. Here I will set the frame for making sense of this problem by exploring the role of AI in shaping a new world order, while in the next chapter we will explore the economic dimensions of the AI divide. These are crucial questions for understanding how the gap is widening; for global inequality is, after all, a matter of how the goods, resources, and benefits available to humans are distributed across the world, given that this distribution depends on who holds power and influence over global decision-making. We will begin with a brief history of AI and the promises in which it was enfolded.

As the field developed and new technological breakthroughs sparked new ideas about what AI can do for and to the world, technology assumed increasing importance for sovereign states, until its explosion into public policy in 2016 and the emergence of a new arms race, centred around the competition for global AI leadership. At the centre of this arms race is the figure of China: a new global powerhouse whose rising influence, as we will see, has everything to do with AI. But, as nations jostle in this new world order, protectionist policies emerge that seek to uphold national interests at all costs. In the closing section of this chapter we will examine who pays the price for these policies and who is expelled from the new world order. We will review how AI is used, at the all-important borders of sovereign power, to deny certain people entry and freedom of movement – people just like the voyager in the second vignette of the Introduction (pp. 1–2). Crucially, we will see how the AI arms race relates to the evident racial bias built into the technology and how AI works as a technology of race, to produce racial difference and to deny human equality.

The Dawn of AI

The development of AI has never been far from the jostling of nation states in global hierarchies of power. Accounts of the birth of AI as a field of computing date back to the work of the British mathematician Alan Turing during and after the Second World War. Exploring the potential of computing technologies to help decode enemy communications, he devised the concept of the thinking machine, capable of learning from the input data it received and processed. In 1956, two years after Turing’s untimely death, a summer research workshop was convened at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where leading experts in mathematics, logic, and computing were brought together by John McCarthy, an American professor of mathematics. It was at this workshop – or, more accurately, in the proposal sent to its funders, the Rockefeller Foundation – that the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined, establishing a new field of science. According to McCarthy, this term described the endeavour of ‘making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving’.2

The definition of AI and its objectives has, despite major technological advances, remained fairly constant. AI seeks to mimic (and surpass) human intelligence and functions in a number of ways. One of the most prominent forms of AI is machine learning, a discipline that underlies almost all AI...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
• Schlagworte: AI for Good • AI risks • AI Superpowers • AI threat to global equality • algorithmic justice • artificial intelligence risks • is AI a threat? • is AI bad? • tech leaders • who are the AI superpowers? • who benefits from AI? • who benefits most from AI? • who owns AI tech?
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-5311-8 / 1509553118
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5311-2 / 9781509553112