Relationships

Uses and Trends

When regarding AI, an idea that often jumps to mind is “How will it help us to better interact with our technology?”. In this section the question that we will be discussing is “Will it help or hinder us in interacting with each other?”. Some more positive uses of weak AI that know of today range from things like Alexa to the Roomba, but I think it will be a little while before our vacuum cleaners start giving relationship advice. On the other hand, one very popular use of AIs that may have a negative impact on humanity is in creating and spreading “fake news”. 

Disruptive Impact

In an article posted on The Atlantic, Nicholas A. Christakis discusses real world examples of how AI has already been seen corrupting human relationships. He states, “A study examining 5.7 million Twitter users in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election found that trolling and malicious Russian accounts—including ones operated by bots—were regularly retweeted in a similar manner to other, unmalicious accounts, influencing conservative users particularly strongly. By taking advantage of humans’ cooperative nature and our interest in teaching one another—both features of the social suite—the bots affected even humans with whom they did not interact directly, helping to polarize the country’s electorate.” (Christakis, 2019) 

Predictions

Now no one can really say for sure how much of an impact these fake news bots had on the 2016 election, but it is clear that they made quite a good attempt. As these types of weak AI continue to be developed there is a possibility that they may end up being very powerful political weapons. AI and security technology experts predict that future “…digital, physical and political attacks using artificial intelligence could include speech synthesis for impersonation; analysis of human behaviors, moods and beliefs for manipulation; automated hacking and physical weapons like swarms of micro-drones.” (Clifford, 2019)