Aya ECH-CHARQAOUY

Abdelmalek El Kadoussi
14
07/12/2021

Risks of artificial intelligence

Job Automation

AI will create pressure on the labour market in the years ahead. Since job automation is

often regarded as the most pressing issue. It is no more a question of whether AI will replace

sorts of occupations, but rather to what extent? Disruption is well underway in many

industries, notably but not primarily those in which people perform predictable and repetitive

jobs: Positions needing repetitive activities are the most susceptible, but as machine learning

algorithms improve, jobs requiring degrees may become more vulnerable as well. Experts

concur that the biggest immediate risk of AI applications is job automation. According to a

2019 Brookings Institution report, automation threatens around 25% of American jobs.

According to the report, low-wage employees, particularly those in food service, office

management, and administration, would be impacted by automation.

Data Sourcing and Violation of Personal Privacy

A data breach occurs when information is stolen or removed from a system without the

owner's knowledge or authority. A data breach can occur in either a small or large firm.

Stolen data may contain sensitive, proprietary, or confidential information such as credit card

details, customer information, corporate secrets, or national security concerns. The

consequences of a data breach might include damage to the target company's reputation
because of a perceived "betrayal of trust." Victims and their clients may potentially incur

financial damages if associated data are included in the stolen information.

The International Data Corporation projecting that the global datasphere will grow from 33

zettabytes (33 trillion gigabytes) in 2018 to 175 zettabytes (175 trillion gigabytes) by 2025.

As this data world increases at an exponential rate, the risks of disclosing customer or

employee data increase, making personal privacy increasingly difficult to protect.

2021 Data Breach Facts: An estimated 85% of data breaches in 2020 involved a human

element. Phishing is the top threat action that results in a breach. The number of breaches that

involve ransomware has doubled. More than 60% of breaches involve credentials. Over 80%

of breaches are discovered by external parties.

Source: Verizon/Ponemon Institute Data Breach Investigations Report 2021

Accidents and Physical Safety Consideration

If left unchecked, it’s possible for AI’s imperfections to cause physical harm.

According to June 2020 research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS),

driverless cars will still fail to avoid almost two-thirds of collisions. This was especially

true for scenarios like as speeding or unlawful traffic manoeuvres – purposeful

behaviours based on driver choice. In a statement about the study, IIHS research

scientist Alexandra Mueller said, “It will be crucial for designers to prioritize safety

over rider preferences if autonomous vehicles are to live up to their promise to be safer

than human drivers.”

 Also, Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems designed to kill. These

weapons have the potential to unleash widespread devastation if they fall into the hands

of the wrong person. Furthermore, an AI arms race might unwittingly lead to an AI

war with catastrophic victims. To prevent being foiled by the adversary, these weapons

would be engineered to be incredibly difficult to simply "switch off," allowing humans

to lose control of such a situation. This risk exists even with narrow AI, but it escalates

as AI intelligence and autonomy develop.

Loss of skills

Smart software makes our life simpler and reduces the number of monotonous chores

we have to perform - for example, navigation, handwriting, mental arithmetic, remembering

phone numbers, being able to anticipate rain by looking at the sky, and so on. It is not

immediately critical. In everyday life, we are losing abilities and entrusting them to

technology. This has been going on for millennia. For example, hardly no one knows how to

build fire by hand today. In this context, I believe it is vital to ask: aren't we becoming overly

reliant on modern technology? How powerless do we want to feel in the absence of digital

technology?

Not to mention that sophisticated computer systems will progressively comprehend who

we are, what we do, and why we do it, and will provide us with tailored services: Isn't it a

significant human?

Bias Concerns and socio-economic inequality

 One purported benefit of AI is that computers can make fair judgements without being

influenced by human prejudice. However, the quality of an AI system's choices is only as

good as the data it is trained on. Google researcher Timnit Gebru said the root of bias is

social rather than technological and called scientists like herself “some of the most

dangerous people in the world, because we have this illusion of objectivity.” The

scientific field, she noted, “has to be situated in trying to understand the social dynamics

of the world, because most of the radical change happens at the social level.” If a certain

demographic is underrepresented in the data used to train a machine learning model, the

model's output may be biased toward that community. Facial recognition technology are the

most recent applications to be scrutinized, although there have been previous instances of

prejudice in recent years. In most cases, it is often the underlying data that cause the bias.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, “Models may be trained on data containing

human decisions or on data that reflect second-order effects of societal or historical

inequities.” Bias can even result from the way data was collected.

Various forms of AI bias are detrimental, too. Speaking recently to the New York

Times, Princeton computer science professor Olga Russakovsky said it goes well beyond

gender and race. In addition to data and algorithmic bias (the latter of which can

“amplify” the former), AI is developed by humans and humans are inherently biased.

Another source of worry is the increase in socioeconomic disparity caused by AI-

driven job loss. Work, with education, has traditionally been a driver of social mobility.

However, when it comes to a specific type of employment — the predictable, repetitive

sort that is vulnerable to AI takeover — research has shown that people who are left out
in the cold are considerably less likely to acquire or seek retraining than those in

higher-level positions with more money.

Sources:

https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-

gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages#part1

The Technological Singularity by Murray Shanahan

The Technological Singularity by Murray Shanahan