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Author:Mila Kalezic
Mila Kalezic is a junior at Amador Valley High School in California with a passion for social studies. She has taken many advanced placement classes surrounding history and human geography, excelling in all her studies. As Mila aspires to pursue a future in business or humanities, she is enthusiastic about sharing her love for understanding the intricacies of the world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has begun a new wave of digitalization in the world and has brought a flood of conversations about the effects it will bring on society. AI has become the new buzzword of the decade as it introduces us to fresh opportunities, challenges, and the potential for a new technological revolution. Self-learning computer algorithms have been in development for decades, and with the release of Open AI in late 2022, AI is being integrated to an extent not seen before in everyday life. Chat GPT (the leading AI chatbot) has already reached 100 million users and the AI industry is anticipated to experience an annual growth rate of 37.3% between 2023 and 2030, according to Grand View Research. However, even with all the hype surrounding this potential oracle, caution should also follow. Artificial Intelligence has the power to revolutionize the world by improving efficiency, innovation, and information systems. In turn, it has the equal power to destroy millions of jobs, worsen our carbon footprint, and lead humanity down a lazy and frightening future. The consequences of AI are significant and the way it is regulated and monitored today can profoundly influence the prospects of tomorrow.
AI in the Economic World
To begin with the most burning issue, Artificial Intelligence has already shaken the business world and its impact continues to grow. AI has been proven to be a very helpful asset in the corporate sector with its ability to process data, provide boundless information, and produce eloquent speech. As researched by Zippia, 35% of businesses have already implemented AI and Forbes Advisor finds that 97% of businesses believe that AI adoption will aid their company’s operation. Corporations are jumping at the opportunity to utilize AI to replace low-skill labor with algorithms to improve efficiency. Artificial Intelligence can do mundane and routine tasks exponentially faster than humans, and more reliably, as its adaptive algorithms leave no room for human error. According to Iris, humans are most productive for only 3 to 4 hours a day, while AI can work around the clock with no downtime. The use of artificial intelligence for these repetitive tasks will be significantly cheaper, and companies can improve efficiency by relying on AI while focusing their human labor on more high-skilled jobs. As great as this sounds for executives, adopting AI in the workplace can cause many to lose their jobs. As predicted by a McKinsey Report, 400 million people are anticipated to become unemployed due to AI. The danger is not only limited to low-skilled jobs, however, as AI is also a danger to programmers, journalists, data analysts, customer service, and many others. With an existing unemployment crisis, particularly in the United States, AI could exacerbate job loss in the economic world.
There are some limitations, however, to the power of Artificial Intelligence. Although it is powered by concrete facts and hard data, tends to be limited in creativity. Industries that rely on creativity or human contact will grow with more people being pushed into fields such as humanity, art, and social work. New jobs will form with AI, itself, becoming a bigger industry, including AI maintenance and development. Although it will definitely change and shape a new economic order, Artificial Intelligence will also bring new opportunities for economic development. The World Economic Forum predicts up to 97 million new jobs will be created due to Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless, this does not exactly counteract the displacement of jobs, and regulations to limit AI from replacing jobs must be put in place to avoid an economic downturn.
AI Effects on Society and Politics
Beyond the economic world, the AI wave will make a big splash in societal and political spheres. Artificial Intelligence is open to the public, and can be accessed very easily. Everyday activities, such as creating schedules, providing information, generating recipes, writing emails, or even asking for advice, can be done with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Yet with the ease and convenience of typing in a command and letting AI complete mundane everyday tasks for us, the temptation to replace critical thinking skills with an effective algorithm can easily prevail. Who would want to spend time and energy writing a thank you note when AI can create one far more eloquent with the click of a button? Using AI will change the way we live, making humans more “sloth-like” while we let bots do our work for us. Reliance on AI to provide advice and make decisions will also damage the human mindset. Critical thinking will be lost as people become increasingly dependent on AI for decision-making. The advice AI gives us has the power to shape the very way we think, live our lives, and predict outcomes. Although using Artificial Intelligence can improve our daily lives by removing these routine tasks, it may cause the human mind to become lazier and can shape our lives in unnatural ways.
Besides using AI for everyday tasks, an addiction to using AI causes people to skip crucial elements of work. The academic world is already in distress over preventing students from using Artificial Intelligence to complete their homework and even write entire essays. The next generations of students will not develop crucial writing, research, or language skills if they exploit AI to complete their tasks for them. Even those who choose not to depend on AI will be harmed, because they will be competing against students who do. Academic integrity will be eroded if the tasks completed by Artificial Intelligence cannot be consistently distinguished from the genuine work of humans. Not limited to students, but politicians, journalists, and policymakers could also start using AI for objective literature in the political sphere. For all of human history, written material has been produced only by other humans, but if AI takes over our literature, it could form ideas that can be harmful, unsympathetic, and dangerous due to its lack of emotions. Artificial Intelligence was created and shaped by humans in the past and present, but Artificial Intelligence could easily, if used without caution, could start shaping humans instead.
Another issue arises when Artificial Intelligence is being used as an information system. Artificial Intelligence can be used to supply knowledge by typing questions into a chatbot. Of course, this isn't anything new as existing search engines already provide information in much the same fashion, with one key difference — instead of a list of search results, an AI chatbot returns one statement as a final response. While this provides a concise, direct, and easy-to-understand answer to a question, this kind of finality and certitude can be dangerous. Even stepping over the fact that Artificial Intelligence can provide inaccurate information (as seen with Google’s Bard AI chatbot) using only AI on a nuanced topic can be misleading. By using normal search engines to research certain topics allows us to view a multitude of different sources to come to our own conclusions, therefore preventing us from only finding one-sided information and developing our critical thinking. On the other hand, letting AI make conclusions for us is a slippery slope. When doing our own research, we find multiple sources to back our arguments and claims up, but when leaving it to AI, we allow it to dictate what and how we think. ChatGPT does not even provide the sources it uses to generate an answer, completely removing this aspect of researching and fact-checking.
Although Artificial Intelligence is programmed to be objective, they can of course form biases based on the information they are being fed. For instance, with many experiments done with political spectrum quizzes, ChatGPT consistently lands on a left-leaning or completely left side. In addition, when asked to respond to political
statements with “support” or “not support”, Chat GPT almost always sides with common left-leaning beliefs on abortion, gun laws, LGBTQ+ issues, and immigration laws. An information bot with a political bias, could slowly influence us with its answers, and politicians could use this to their advantage. Different chatbots having different biases can increase separation and can easily contribute to polarization, especially in the US. Already, primitive AI used in social media such as TikTok or Instagram uses an algorithm to appeal to your political biases. If AI chatbots continue being biased while still being seen as the all-knowing oracles, it could devastate national unity and bring a rapid increase in polarization.
Environmental Costs of AI
With all of these concerns and advantages surrounding the use of Artificial Intelligence, it is also important to discuss the cost of maintaining it. Due to its substantial energy consumption and required infrastructure, the cost of having widespread Artificial Intelligence is the health of our planet. According to TechTarget, the energy consumption of AI over nine days exceeds the energy consumption of three households for an entire year. With multiple Artificial Intelligences being developed and used by millions globally, the energy burden of AI will continue to build up. Without a way to build AI facilities and maintain AI infrastructure in an environmentally friendly way, continued use of AI could worsen our carbon footprint on the planet, taking into consideration that it requires thousands of GPUs and CPUs which are very resource-heavy to create. The energy that powers AI primarily relies on fossil fuels and will contribute to higher greenhouse gas emission in the air and the possibility of using renewable energy to power AI is pretty slim so far. Therefore, AI companies must strive to find ways to reduce the amount of energy that is consumed by its use. Assuming this problem continues, the moral question of whether AI development is justified despite the environmental impact will certainly remain.
Current and Future Regulations
The environmental, political, social, and economic consequences of Artificial Intelligence have raised concerns over how it should be controlled and regulated. With the fear of job displacement, over-reliance on AI, indoctrination, and further global warming, it is becoming apparent that action must be taken. The European Union (EU) has begun its legal framework around an Artificial Intelligence Act in 2021 and is making more adjustments as its use and development continue to grow. The EU’s AI Act would sort certain different AI capabilities as unacceptable risk, high-risk, and low-risk. Unacceptable risk abilities include social scoring and real time remote biometric identification systems. These abilities are banned and would not be allowed in public Artificial Intelligent programs. High-risk abilities such as law interpretation, education, and employment capabilities, will first have to be checked by the EU and then monitored through its development. AI chatbots themselves are required to disclose that they are Artificially Intelligent and not actually human as well as being barred from giving illegal information. The purpose of this act is to ensure the human rights of users are not infringed and guarantee that AI is safe, trustworthy, and follows existing EU guidelines. This act is projected to be fully in practice by 2026 and could be the guideline of future AI international laws that follow.
Regulations are important for ensuring that Artificial Intelligence does not get too out of hand and remains more helpful than harmful. Even the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last few months meeting with hundreds of congressmen and lawmakers in the US to get a jump start on setting up regulations to minimize the risk posed by this powerful technology. Some, however, argue that restricting some abilities of AI is undemocratic and encroaches upon civil liberties. Others fear that their country will fall behind economically and technologically if AI development is hindered by government intervention. External states will be able to improve their own economic efficiency with the full use of AI and further its technological revolution. AI is a powerful tool and its use is a delicate balance. Both over and under regulation can have severe consequences that cannot be ignored.
The implications of this new oracle are extremely complicated and should be approached with caution. New regulations are being developed and will be integrated in the upcoming years. The dangers cannot be ignored and action must be taken or humanity will be left behind. Before that, however, the question of how society will deal with this crashing wave of fresh economic burdens, new social issues, and upcoming political hurdles will continue. Millions are already being affected, but the full scale of the future of AI is unknown. With this frightening intelligence comes exciting possibilities and lots of potential for damage to us and our future generations. We are on the brink of a technological age where humans are no longer the only intelligence. We will have to learn to control AI or we will be forced to fight it.
