Turning now to the angel side of the question. I will assert that AI is the greatest tool invented so far to fight and defeat tyranny. Among its many other benefits, AI is only beginning to be used to address the systems and methods used to impose control.
Part 1: Artificial Intelligence--Demon or Angel--The Demons Show Up First
Part 2: Artificial Intelligence--Demon or Angel--Then Come the Angels
As but one obvious example, consider our modern educational system. Most are aware of how the power seeking Left has gained control over schools and universities in order to indoctrinate and propagandize in the name of education. We see the results daily. Young people who are adept at protesting, but who have no knowledge of history and who cannot read or perform math beyond a third grade level. "Students" who know with certainty many things that are manifestly false but are what they have been taught.
AI offers the opportunity for virtually everyone to get a top quality education with personal tutoring at every level from kindergarten to graduate school in almost any field you can name. A few subjects such as chemistry, biology, medicine and engineering might require access to brick and mortar facilities at some point, but most of the material can be taught online through AI. The cost of a high quality education is now at the level of pennies a day, and it is available at a pace suitable to each individual student rather than determined by some average calendar age. Goodbye college loan debt. Welcome to graduate level home schooling.
Some will ask how we can know if someone has actually learned a subject if they study it on line? Granted, one benefit of the education system is certification of ability. However, we have seen the decay in value of such certification to where today it represents little more than an indication that someone was in attendance at an institution for some extended period of time.
AI can ensure that a student has a real and thorough understanding of a subject, both through testing and through a record of student's progress. It can also ensure that a person claiming ability actually has that ability. It creates new opportunities for firms to offer meaningful certification and access to resources such as labs to augment online learning.
Furthermore, AI systems have access to much of the world's data sources, including primary source materials in history,, science, and every other area. The ability of the current education system to limit instruction to "approved" materials and propaganda is destroyed. Students would no longer be captive to biased or incompetent instruction.
Critical theory systems of analysis and explanation would collapse into the thin air of their fabrication. False histories such as the 1619 project would not survive examination based on histories written by people who were actually there. All sorts of things taught as "fact" today could be challenged through AI education so that truth might prevail.
The ability to provide real and honest and effective education would go far to eliminate many of the problems today with Socialist organizations gaining power through misinformation. I haven't even mentioned the ability of AI to detect and expose corruption, fraud, lies, and so many other tools of power and control.
AI can root out and expose hidden evidence of election fraud. It is already being used to uncover and expose financial fraud. We have only begun to tap the potential for exposing misuse of power, and for devising ways to preserve and protect individual power, property, and freedom.
A major way that AI can help is to equalize small businesses. For most of our history, the great bulk of employment was provided by small businesses. In recent decades, the regulatory burden of governments at all levels has favored large organizations. A big business can afford to have staff, even a department, to deal with regulatory compliance so that compliance is a relatively small portion of their business.
Small businesses, on the other hand, are usually subject to the same compliance requirements, but that burden often consumes a major portion of the work—much larger than the proportion for a big business. In too many cases, compliance can mean the difference between success and failure.
AI is the great equalizer, the Colt 45, for small businesses. AI can identify what regulations apply, can complete paperwork, find assistance or alternatives, and essentially serve as the resource that a big business has in its compliance department. A healthy population of small businesses is the core of a healthy middle class.
Even the tasks involved in starting a business—licenses, market research, website construction, banking, legal, accounting, and many other tasks involved in a new business can be done in hours or days that would require weeks or months of effort before.
This only begins to touch on the advantages AI gives small businesses to compete with big organizations, the ability of individuals to explore and pursue new opportunities, the "force multiplier" it provides when dealing with so many routine tasks. We are still discovering how we might use this tool—this powerful partner.
One of many other areas where AI can free humans from common tasks is in work that has value, but is not worth hiring someone to do it. That is not taking away a job, since the job never existed. It is simply relieving someone of a time-consuming task.
As a trivial example, imagine someone using AI to plan a week's menus for a family of five, taking into account any food constraints, presenting the menus, providing options, and once finalized, preparing a shopping list of ingredients, along with a list of convenient sources and locations with lowest prices. People do this manually every day, often at great cost in personal time. Using AI assistance can cut the time dramatically, freeing time for other activities
I use AI in my own work. I can describe an analysis I want to perform, provide it to AI, and get the answers back in seconds. Often such analyses would take days for me to write code to perform, run the tasks and get results. Often, once I have the first results, I will want to go further into analysis, or use those results as part of a new analysis. AI has enabled me to do in days the tasks that used to take weeks or months. It acts as the intelligent assistant that I could not afford to hire.
My own work has even exposed a new type of job that others are also finding— something known as "babysitting". AI systems think in ways different from humans, and lack practical real-world experience. Left to its own devices, AI can wander into responses that are logically consistent or interesting, but not practical or useful.
For example, AI may suggest that the best color for sunglasses is dark blue. Looking deeper, one might find that it had assumed the sky was orange, based on a picture of a sunset it had been given. A human would know otherwise and could correct the false assumption. This AI supervision is an essential job for anyone who wants to use AI as a tool—one of the many new jobs AI creates. We need someone to watch if AI suggests changing the spark plugs while an engine is running as a time saving measure, as one of a great many logical but unwise or impossible real-world differences.
The positive uses of AI, even in its relatively primitive state, are limited only by our imagination. Like any powerful tool, it can be used for good as well as evil. Like powerful tools of the past, it amplifies the power of individuals and exposes the moral dimension of our activities.
Is AI the devil we know today, or the angel we are coming to know. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box has been opened, the camel is in the tent, pick your metaphor, but AI is here to stay, if not in this country, then in the rest of the world. Yes, like any powerful tool, it can be used for good or evil. Shall we be luddites and fight the inevitable or be part of the grand new partnership of discovery. Angel or demon—you decide ... and choose.
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David Robb is a practicing scientist and CTO of a small firm developing new security technologies for detection of drugs and other contraband. Dave has published extensively in TheBlueStateConservative, and occasionally in American Thinker.
