For humanity’s brightest future, the blue-sky, lofty thinkers in AI need the help of the muddy-boots pragmatists
Artificial intelligence thinkers seem to emerge from two communities. One is what I call blue-sky visionaries who speculate about the future possibilities of the technology, invoking utopian fantasies to generate excitement. Blue-sky ideas are compelling but are often clouded over by unrealistic visions and the ethical challenges of what can and should be built.
While the futuristic thinking of the blue-sky speculators sparks our awe and earns much of the funding, muddy-boots thinking reminds us that some AI applications threaten privacy, spread misinformation and are decidedly racist, sexist and otherwise ethically dubious.
The theme of robots replacing people, thereby creating widespread unemployment, was legitimized by a 2013 report from Oxford University, which claimed that 47 percent of all jobs could be automated. Futurist Martin Ford’s 2015 book Rise of the Robots latched on to this idea, painting a troubling picture of low- and high-skilled jobs becoming so completely automated that governments would have to supply a universal basic income because there would be few jobs left.
Other books, such as Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, followed on how algorithms needed to be changed to increase economic opportunities and decrease racial bias.