Autonomous Cars, damage guised as gratis.

Let me Start off by being transparent, I love the concept of self driving cars. As a kid growing up watching the Jetsons on TV I thought that having cars that drove(or in this case flew) themselves was the height of luxury. However I will also say that the idea that this is purely a beneficial advancement is foolish at best, and flat out stupid at worst. In the video talking about the cascading consequences of this innovation(How Will Autonomous Vehicles Transform Our Cities? | Nico Larco | TEDxCollegePark, 2018) the best point is the lack of foresight and manpower. We as a society have trouble looking past our own ambition, long reaching consequences are often brushed off as problems for our future selves.

This kind of thinking goes hand in hand with my second point, Trusting AI. We as a society Have entirely too much trust in AI in it’s current developmental stage to properly assess the fallout of it’s integration. I’m sure your curious how I came to this conclusion, how can I say definitively that we have too much faith in AI? I have a simple one word answer to that, money. In the post on IBMs website (Education, 2021) they discuss the various modern uses of AI. The one that really truly shocked me was the use of it in a day trading system. As a society or as a species we cannot do a whole lot without some form of financial assets. Its harder to find work, its harder to find friends and even find a relationship. So you would think that when it came to something so valuable, so impactful, in all aspects of our lives that we would be rather cautious about where our money goes. Yet people allow an AI that they likely don’t even understand on a basic level to handle possibly their entire investing portfolio. The argument could be made that, even then, they are smart enough to invest money they are willing to lose. That doesn’t take away the fact that instead of trusting themselves, or even a seasoned financial advisor they would trust an AI. They would trust an AI with one of the most impactful aspects of their lives without even understanding it, that to me is extremely dangerous.

Sources:
1. How Will Autonomous Vehicles Transform Our Cities? | Nico Larco | TEDxCollegePark. (2018, October 24). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTOFMwKEg7o
2. Education, I. C. (2021, June 23). Artificial Intelligence (AI). IBM.Com. https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/what-is-artificial-intelligence#:%7E:text=In%20popular%20usage%2C%20artificial%20intelligence,these%20and%20other%20capabilities%20to