About the Author:
David Barnhizer is a Professor of Law Emeritus at Cleveland State University. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and worked in the International Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was Executive Director of the Year 2000 Committee, and consulted with the World Resources Institute, IIED, the UNDP, the President's Council on Environmental Quality, the World Bank, the UN/FAO, World Wildlife Fund/US. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from Ohio State University summa cum laude, and a Masters of Law degree from Harvard.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1, Society Under Siege
With the combination of Artificial Intelligence and robotics (AI/robotics) humans have opened a “Pandora’s Box” and are incapable of undoing the ills that are being released, with more coming seemingly by the day. The joining of Artificial Intelligence and robotic systems that are increasingly capable of acting more effectively than us in a wide range of work, surveillance, and information detection and management situations is the primary driver of a shift that is tearing our fracturing societies further apart.
Our political leaders have an extremely limited understanding of what is occurring with Artificial Intelligence and robotics, in terms of the elimination of massive numbers of jobs, and the potentially devastating impacts of these developments on the United States, Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Bill Gross, of Janus Capital, has warned: “No one in 2016 is really addressing the future as we are likely to experience it.” He explains: “the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind this curve.... Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected representatives don’t seem to know what’s really wrong.”
Artificial Intelligence applications and robotics are taking over our culture, altering how we behave and even who we are as addictions grow and our dependence on AI/robotics systems expands exponentially. Examples of our dependence are easy to
find. We are often required to pass tests for on-line access to various websites by answering the question “Are you a robot?” accompanied by numbers or specially constructed pictures designed to prove that we are flesh and blood humans to the AI application controlling the site. In the US we are flooded by billions of continuous “robocalls” and telephonic and e-mail scams made to seem as if a human is calling to the point that many do not answer their landline or discontinue service entirely.
Such things seem trivial or irritating but, when we think more deeply about what they portend, it demonstrates the penetration of AI/robotics into much of what we do, our heightened dependence on such systems, and the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate human from AI. Penetration, dependence and the difficulty of differentiation are developing rapidly. Recent reports on video and virtual reality technology indicate they are reaching a stage at which false images can be created that are impossible to distinguish from reality.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.