"All Watched Over By Machines," or AI Ethics, Surveillance, and Pluralism

Abstract

Right now, multiple conversations are occurring across places as disparate as damp IT basements, lofty executive suites, virtual team meetings, pristine computer labs, and hazy dorm rooms about what AI really is in this present moment and what AI can really become in the near and distant futures. Doomers claim artificial general intelligence is on the horizon, bringing with it widespread job automation, economic disruption, and the collapse of modern-day societies. Utopians posit that AGI will bring unprecedented freedoms; increase access, safety, and democracy; and reshape our relationships among ourselves and with the world into a perfect, self-sustaining harmony. Halfway along this ideological spectrum, between doomer and utopian, lies the pragmatist, who weighs both the benefits and the risks associated with AI as it is deployed today, with an eye toward how AI might also be deployed tomorrow. Whatever super-intelligent AI might be invented five or fifty years from now, it will likely come about through a series of deceptively small and seemingly insignificant steps, as, in the words of Emily Dickinson, Forever is composed of Nows.