Artificial intelligence’s lack of transparency is leading many to fear the technology and others to elevate it to a mysterious god-like figure, but we should be more critical of those making decisions about how AI is used, says anthropologist Beth Singler
We are growing used to the idea of artificial intelligence influencing our daily lives, but for some people, it is an opaque technology that poses more of a threat than an opportunity. Anthropologist Beth Singler studies our relationship with AI and robotics and suggests that the lack of transparency behind it leads some people to elevate AI to a mysterious deity-like figure.
Beth Singler: I’m an anthropologist of AI, so I study humans trying to understand how [AI] impacts their lives. As a field, it involves so many different aspects of technology from facial recognition, diagnostic systems, recommendation systems, and for the general public, all those kinds of details get subsumed under this title of AI.
Is there a game that you think, when a computer can play it successfully, it might have reached human level intelligence?. And I think what’s really valuable about that form of game playing is that it’s collaborative storytelling. It’s much more about the experience of playing together rather than success or failure.
For some people, it might be a literal transformation, that this is as close to the existence of a god as we could get, and for others, it’s more a metaphorical relationship between our idea of what a god should be and how powerful this potential singularity AI would be. We’ve had ways of characterising monotheistic deities as being omnipresent, omniscient, hopefully omnibenevolent as well.