President Obama says people need to be worried about the “values” and morality instilled in artificial intelligence, even though the technology has the potential to introduce several other positive changes to people’s lives.
“My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture,” Obama said in long interview with Wired editor Scott Dadich and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab Director Joi Ito.
“We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy,” Obama continued. “If properly harnessed, it can generate enormous prosperity and opportunity.”
“But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs,” he said. “It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.”
Obama discussed the moral dilemmas that will have to be resolved with some artificial intelligence products, such as self-driving cars.
“We have machines that can make a bunch of quick decisions that could drastically reduce traffic fatalities, drastically improve the efficiency of our transportation grid, and help solve things like carbon emissions that are causing the warming of the planet,” Obama stated. But, “what are the values that we’re going to embed in the cars? There are gonna be a bunch of choices that you have to make, the classic problem being: If the car is driving, you can swerve to avoid hitting a pedestrian, but then you might hit a wall and kill yourself. It’s a moral decision, and who’s setting up those rules?”
Obama said it’s too early to be afraid of some of the darker sides to AI that many popular movies have explored.
“In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix,” Obama says, referencing the popular movie trilogy. “My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks.”
The lengthy discussion is part of an issue that Obama “guest-edited” focused on new frontiers and new technologies.
