By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
It is official, or soon will be, that with the entrenchment of AI in all corners of American life, you will be introduced to a new big brother who, like a loved starved child, will cling to you till death do us part!
You say that you do not need any more siblings? Well, too bad, brother (or sister), because with the powerful invasive tools of AI, you will be silently monitored for your locations, banking activities, social media accounts, military history, your interactions with the federal government.
AI can have its redeeming qualities when it works for the good to monitor criminal activity and to alert governmental entities regarding failsafe systems for the environment, airport traffic control, pollutants and illicit goods entering the United States.
AI can be a positive boom when it involves complex mathematical solutions, safe chemical compositions, supply chain snafu’s and the orderly administration of vast amounts of record keeping.
With respect to research, AI can be a supportive tool to find, distill and present facts and figures that, if done by hand, would require hundreds of hours of labor.
However, and this is true for any advancement that has happened because of the arrival of the computer chip, AI, with any nefarious operators, can quickly go to the “dark side” and engage in surreptitious acts and use misleading facts that can cause mischief and truths to be questioned.
Now, we are learning that the Pentagon under the dubious leader of toy soldier, Pete Hegseth, wants to have its current AI provider, Anthropic, “monitor” civilians.
The implications of the military being engaged in the monitoring of non-military personnel carries momentous risks of people not having any say in allowing an AI operative to watch them as they go about their daily lives.
Imagine, if you will, that you are in a group of protestors bringing to light the activities of ICE and, unbeknownst to you, AI has been tracking you since you left your apartment and drove to the protest site and is carefully recording your acts and statements denouncing ICE.
Imagine if you will that AI is monitoring your spending habits on line and the social media sites you frequent and any commentary that you may place on that site.
Your imagination can go into freefall if you can conjure up the unlimited variations of AI “collaborating” with the postal system, welfare system, universities and the IRS to see what you do and how you do it; use that data to construct a file on you…for future references.
Technically, AI is supposed to be a tool that is managed by its human handlers in order to avoid AI going rogue on itself when it is left to its own devices and one of those devices is its now alarming ability to grow itself and think for itself and to avoid being muzzled.
If you saw the prescient movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey, the computer in that movie was so advanced that it could sense that its human operator, Hal, was about to shut it off and the machine told Hal not to do it!
What worried the original creators of AI was that with the ongoing advancement of computer technology and more advanced software, AI could reach a point that it did not need a human handler but it could make “decisions” on its own.
That new frontier has arrived with alarming speed and the results can be, that unless monitored by humans who have positive values about freedom of life and liberty, this AI frontier is fraught with serious dangers.
Can you think of a situation wherein AI is trusted with the management of military machinery and armaments to the point that AI will sense a danger to the US from a foreign country and would, on its own command, release missiles against that country.
Imagine the horror of AI mistaking a person’s identity for an adversary and that person is arrested on false charges because AI had no human component to check any perceived abuses or excesses.
By giving AI such leeway and permissions to do or perform acts that we normally would submit to rigorous human examination and testing, a society is defaulting to the whims and programming, good or bad, of a machine or a computer that we have inadvertently placed too much hope and confidence in.
The companies or systems that use AI or are planning to give AI literally carte blanche with its records or personnel files or financial systems are playing a dangerous game when AI develops to the point that it will disregard human interference because the AI machine thinks is now knows more than you!
At this dangerous point, AI is no longer a helpmate but a clear and present danger to all and someone would have to “pull the plug” and re compute this hydra headed monster so that at all times, AI is subservient to the human operator.
If not believable, re-read the novel by George Orwell, 1984, and you will see that there is nothing new under the sun.
So, the next time you go to a ballgame or attend a political rally or check out a book at a library or lambast Trump on social media, remember, Big Brother, aka…AI… is silently watching you.
Contact Lafe Tolliver at lafe5x@gmail.com