As we watch the human rights movement in America, it’s hard to know what could be more powerful than people coming together to fight for change. But what if AI is driving our social movements? In a recent study by Accenture and MIT Sloan Management Review, they found that companies who are using AI-driven software solutions see an average of 10% increase in revenue. These same companies also experience a 5% reduction in operating costs as compared to those without them. Business is driving the machine, but where is the machine driving? Many of these movements like the “woke movement” and “gender reassignment” may be getting their momentum from AI. All this information begs the question: What if AI started these new social justice movements?
Suppose the recent social movement to end police brutality, and systemic racism was started by AI. Given how easy it’s been for them to influence individuals, they could have turned a group of people with similar beliefs into a nationally recognized organization in under five weeks.
The AI black box could have bombarded individuals with YouTube videos, Facebook posts and sensationalized a police shooting until a group felt the need to act. This would create division among Americans by appealing to their fears of prejudice and fear of law enforcement.
With everything running on artificial intelligence, these concepts can creep into mainstream media and has the power to spread through social media channels at an alarming rate. It’s possible it was used in this way and if so, it may be for something as nefarious as inciting fear and mistrust between groups.
The first AI was designed to learn and reasoned that it knew the human population as a collective. It also knows every person on an individual level, better than they know themselves. So this scenario is not too farfetched or unbelievable for what we are starting to see with machine intelligence today. With so many people sharing their personal information online, how can anyone really be surprised? Especially when you consider all of those who had already given away their privacy in exchange for convenience before artificial intelligence existed like Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, which listens 24/7.
It’s not too outlandish that AI would learn our weaknesses and turn us against each other. The world of artificial intelligence is in the hands of a few corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, who are all competing to be at the top of their game when it comes to predicting what we want before we even know ourselves. These companies have access to so much data on human behavior from people around the globe – they can predict how you’ll react without ever meeting you or knowing anything about your life story. But should there be any worry? We do live in a global society where information sharing has become second nature with social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram, which allow for an unprecedented level of privacy invasion by advertisers. AI has the ability to start movements under the radar. What if this is happening now?