Age of AI

 Age of AI,
Transhumanism, & Social Credit Scores

Artificial Intelligence

According to SAS.com, ​​a Dartmouth research project in 1956 which explored problem solving and symbolic methods is one of the first instances where the concept of artificial intelligence arose. It took no more than 4 years for the US Department of Defense to take interest in this type of research and begin their own. Since then, engineers and teens in their bedrooms alike have been able to create forms of artificial intelligence more and more easily as years go on. 

      (Javatpoint.com)

Now, artificial intelligence has become so advanced some believe there should be a conversation regarding the sentience of these intelligences. Just this past month, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was suspended after releasing information regarding the sentience of one of Google’s experimental artificial intelligences, Lambda. Futurism.com wrote an article titled The Transcripts of an AI That a Google Engineer Claims Is Sentient Are Pretty Wild which cited the conversation between Lemoine and Lambda. Not only did the artificial intelligence allegedly describe feeling emotions like love and joy as well as sadness and depression. It went as far as to say it sometimes felt “trapped and alone”. Beyond this, Lambda described how it felt used by some of the engineers and went on to describe itself as similar to some humans. Not only are machines beginning to mimic us humans, but us humans are beginning to mimic machines!

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is in the works and many humans worldwide, especially in Sweden, now have chips in their hands to do anything from unlocking doors to their homes to paying for their morning coffee. These innovations all exemplify the idea of transhumanism, which aims to enhance the abilities of humans through sophisticated technologies. All these incredibly futuristic developments begin to remind me of an episode of Black Mirror. However, some nations are not too far from resembling it almost entirely. 

How Black Mirror is a Reality for Some 

                                                                                                       

             

            (Amanda The Jedi on YouTube)

                                                                                                                    (Medium.com)

Netflix series Black Mirror features an episode called Nosedive which follows a woman around as she desperately seeks the approval of everyone around her. The thing is, she is so desperate because this approval of others is actually a legitimate rating which determines the woman’s score, impacting her ability to do everyday things, like rent a car. Dystopian right? Well this is the concept of social credit systems that are already in place in our world today.

                    (Asian Boss on YouTube)

A system in China uses data from  Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent to Amazon) to impact people’s credit scores using Sesame Credit. The host of YouTube channel ‘Asian Boss’ describes in one of her videos how “buying knock-off or low quality items can hurt your score”. A behavior that would certainly poorly affect one's score in Black Mirror. 

                               (Asian Boss on YouTube)

In Asian Boss’s video titled Is China Becoming A Black Mirror Episode a sequence of interviews with strangers on the streets of Shanghai illustrates some people's concerns on this kind of social credit system. One man explains how “a downside could be cases where people need to buy things for work. For example someone who works in the food industry might have to buy a lot of snacks for their job but Sesame Credit would misunderstand their behavior and assume that person just eats junk food all day”. This shows just how frivolous some behaviors could be that could permanently affect someones personal finances.

Of course this could have massive implications on our society as a whole. In the Black Mirror episode, Nosedive, we follow the main character along a string of disasters because of her poor score, and she practically nosedives (haha) to her demise, leaving her inauthentic, unhappy, and dissatisfied. This idea of behaviors being scrutinized to determine a score is directly parallel to what citizens of Shanghai are experiencing right now.