With great power comes great responsibility.
Beyond the YouTube video you can find about using drones in warfare by searching for this string (below) in your favorite search engine there are other less violent but equally problematic outcomes if AI is used to drive Return On Investment as other technology has been used in the past.
YouTube Stuart Russel Disturbing Simulation
Consider this …
Uber is openly embracing driverless cars. This is being driven (pardon the pun) by Artificial Intelligence (AI). They are also motivated because some states are trying to make drivers employees and not contractors which makes drivers more expensive. Accountants have said for years that you should remove repeating costs from business processes. This can take many forms but one of the easiest is human labor. So a driverless Uber car that only requires an initial investment and minimal maintenance costs, when compared to driver wages, makes sense for their business model. Other hidden benefits also surface like the fact that a driverless car cannot decline a fare and create more idle time. AI can always route the car for a pickup that can arrive the quickest or use less fuel or whatever is needed to optimize profit without human thought anomalies or complaints. It will do the same when picking the route to the destination … again without human thought anomalies and more concrete data like traffic patterns for all routes to the destination. Uber probably has terabytes of data to support what they might want from AI. All of this efficiency will also translate into fewer cars needed to accomplish the same number of passenger fares so less overall investment is required.
Also consider that Tesla and every other major car company is doing most of the R&D for Uber to make driverless cars a reality. Include Google and a few others and this becomes a multi billion dollar R&D fund that Uber gets for nearly free. Unless regulations severely limit the use of driverless cars or at least driverless taxi services this will be one of the early mass successes for AI and it will transform the wage model for an entire industry. If you are going to debate the Employee or Contractor question you need to also understand the potential impact of AI.
You say the investment will be huge to acquire the cars but I would propose their stock price will rise and investors, at least for a while, will line up to provide the cash to purchase driverless cars. Wall Street loves this kind of story.
This is just one example of removing that repeating cost, human wages, from various business processes. Many more will follow.
Hopefully there will be some intelligent and mindful discussion around this specific topic. If the consideration of AI is simply left out of the legislation then states will force Uber and other similar services to make drivers employees. Then, like some other Youtube clips you can easily find about cars jumping things, the scene will become … Up, over, lands, and speeds off down the road … now without a driver and the state legislatures will be left saying … “What just happened?”.
