AI: Balancing convenience and ethics

By: Jasdev

The contemporary world has adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an integral part of its work. Ranging from personal assistants that can switch the lights on and off at command, to self-driving vehicles that allow relaxation during travel. But, at what cost have we allowed AI to manifest its ubiquity?

AI has made a myriad of day-to-day tasks seamless. In the domain of home security, we have alarm systems harnessing AI. They make use of machine learning and facial recognition to create a catalog of people who frequently visit our house. This capacity to harness AI establishes a threshold for home automation. AI ushers in an era of ride-sharing services making travel more convenient. Applications like Uber employ AI to calculate the time it would take from the current location of a user to their destination. A very potent example of AI increasing productivity is its application in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers are employing AI solutions like machine learning and deep learning neural networks to analyse data.

Undoubtedly, advancements in AI have an impact on productivity and efficiency in the technological landscape unseen until now. However, we must not ignore the ethical implications as we continue to integrate AI into our daily lives. One of the biggest concerns is bias. An AI model is as unbiased as the data it is trained on. In 2014, a team of software engineers at Amazon was building a programme to review the resume of job applicants. Unfortunately, in 2015 they realised that the system discriminated against women for technical roles. Meanwhile, in 2019, San Francisco legislators voted against the use of facial recognition, believing facial recognition was prone to errors when used on people with dark skin or women. AI has provided an impetus to the pervasiveness of deep fake content. This has eroded the credibility of images circulating online.

There are underlying moral and ethical challenges that come with the development of AI systems. On one hand, AI paves the way for a convenient tomorrow. While, on the other hand, it poses a plethora of ethical challenges such as compromising privacy, and perpetuating biases, to name a few. Here are some challenges of balancing ethics and convenience in AI:

Privacy concerns: Violation of privacy is one of the most significant concerns associated with AI. AI systems need to collect and analyse vast amounts of data but not limited to browsing history and location. This data can then be used by advanced algorithms constructed for the purpose of target advertising.

Accountability and transparency: The decision-making process of AI systems can sometimes be an enigma, therefore, making it difficult to hold them accountable. As the systems continue to grow in complexity it becomes harder to unravel the decision-making process.

Value system: AI systems can be constructed for a variety of outcomes, such as profit or social good. However, these outcomes can potentially be achieved without a moral compass. As AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, it will be essential to ensure that it aligns with our values.

In conclusion, the integration of AI into our daily lives has made it more convenient than it has ever been. However, we must not ignore the ethical implications that come along with the development and deployment of these systems. The challenges we face include privacy concerns, accountability, and transparency issues to list a few. Therefore, it is imperative that we must collectively strive for a balance between convenience and ethics in AI, so that the systems we deploy serve and align with our societal values and morals instead of being an undercurrent.