AI Needs You by Verity Harding

 

AI is the newest technology to hit the industry.  It is what is fueling the meteoric rise of Nvadia stock and it also is the buzzword that fuels speculation about what life will be once it is more fully established.  Will it replace all jobs?  How will it affect education?  How will it affect the arts?  Will it take the place of artists and authors and other creative individuals?

In this book, Verity Harding explores the necessity for having governments come together and before AI explodes wildly, setting guidelines and rules for its development.  To do this, she uses the example of three previous life changing technologies.

The first is the space race.  President Kennedy set the expectation that space would not be a militarized space but rather one for scientific exploration.  The second is that of IVF, starting with the birth of baby Louisa Brown in England.  In that case, a huge group of organizations came together to set the rules.  It included politicians, scientists, average people and others who had expressed concern about what such a technology would mean.  Those heading up the group realized that the scientists could not have sole control as there were societal concerns as well.  That group ended up agreeing to embryo experimentation up to fourteen days and outlawing paid surrogates.  The last example was the rise of the Internet and the ongoing need for global agreement on who will set the rules for the technology and control the underlying structure.  

Verity Harding has spent her career at the intersection of technology and ethical concerns.  She spent a decade at Google where she spearheaded the department that considered the ethical concerns arising from new technologies.  She currently serves as the head of the AI And Geopolitical Project at the Bennett Institute For Public Policy which is located at Cambridge University.  In this book, she champions the need for thoughtful exploration and rule setting for this new technology.  Often scientists insist that only they can understand what they are doing and need no outside oversight but there are effects of research that impact society as a whole and those must be brought into new technologies.  This book is recommended for nonfiction readers interested in this new technology.