Facing a Changing Industry, AI Activists Rethink Their Strategy | EUROtoday

In the spring of 2018, 1000’s of Google workers pressured the corporate into dropping a serious synthetic intelligence contract with the Pentagon. The tech large even pledged to not use its AI for weapons or sure surveillance techniques sooner or later.

The victory, which got here amid a wave of unprecedented employee-led protests, helped encourage a brand new technology of tech activists in Silicon Valley. But seven years later, the legacy of that second is extra sophisticated. Google just lately revised its AI ethics rules to permit a number of the use instances it beforehand banned, and firms throughout the {industry} are releasing {powerful} new AI instruments at breakneck velocity.

On Tuesday, the AI Now Institute, a suppose tank that research the social implications of synthetic intelligence, revealed a sweeping report on the present AI panorama, detailing the best way energy is turning into concentrated in a handful of dominant firms which have formed narratives concerning the know-how to their very own benefit. The authors recommend new methods for the way activists, civil society teams, and employees can acquire energy in a radically modified surroundings.

The authors level to declarations from tech {industry} figures who say the daybreak of omnipotent superintelligence is correct across the nook—a growth they consider will usher in a utopian age wherein humanity can quickly discover cures for most cancers or clear up local weather change. This concept has “become the argument to end all other arguments, a technological milestone that is both so abstract and absolute that it gains default priority over other means, and indeed, all other ends,” the authors of the report write.

Among its suggestions, AI Now is urging advocacy and analysis teams to attach AI-related points to broader financial considerations, similar to job safety and the way forward for work. While the damaging impacts of synthetic intelligence had been beforehand hidden or summary for workers in lots of fields, beforehand secure profession paths are actually being disrupted throughout many alternative elements of the financial system, from software program engineering to schooling.

The authors see a chance for employees to withstand how AI is being deployed and push again in opposition to tech-industry speaking factors that body outcomes like widespread job loss as inevitable. That might be particularly {powerful} in a political local weather the place Republicans have positioned themselves because the celebration of the working class, although the Trump administration is against most AI regulation.

The authors level to a number of case research within the report the place employees succeeded in halting the implementation of AI at their firms or made positive guardrails had been put in place. One instance is National Nurses United, a union that staged protests in opposition to the usage of AI in well being care and carried out its personal survey displaying the know-how can undermine medical judgment and threaten affected person security. The activism led a variety of hospitals to institute new AI oversight mechanisms and reduce the rollout of some automated instruments.

“What’s unique to this moment is this push to integrate AI everywhere. It’s granting tech companies and the people that run them new kinds of power that go way beyond just deepening their pockets,” says Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of AI Now and one of many authors of the report. “We’re talking about this profound social and economic and political reshaping of the fabric of our lives, and that necessitates a different way of accounting for AI harms.”