Over time, I have come to despise Google most of all, and have actually begun to fear its effect on mankind. I fear that effect because the vast majority of people out there who use Google view it as an unbiased font of information. And Google is heavily leveraging AI and and looking, as described in the "Selfish Ledger" video below, to use it in even broader and in my opinion, more sinister ways. So, I thus mention Google in my discussion of AI, because today, Google controls knowledge. Perhaps not by people like ME, but there are billions of people every day who swallow what Google might tell them as truth, not realizing (or not caring!) that the "Truth" is being shaped and presented to them in ways they do not understand or even comprehend.
Personally, I have some professional experience with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its use, and one of the key points of using AI is to remove a block of human thought that might have to be used to make a decision, and to offload that "block of human thought" into an engine that can use AI to produce a result. That alone sounds bad, but AI in and of itself is not bad. Think of it as a black box where there is a relatively simply input (question) by a human, and a relatively simple output is produced by the AI machine. In the example I give below, the simple question by an ED physician might be "Who should I treat first in my Emergency Department?" could, with the assistance of AI and a LOT of other seemingly unrelated or complicated data inputs, be answered or at least have a suggestion created. So an ED physician, PA, or RN who is setting the priority or helping to set it might be aided by a AI generated list.
There are millions of options where AI might be used the help humans. For example (and I am just making this up) one of the key things that needs to be done in a hospital emergency room is to determine who needs to be seen first. We have to look at the person with a possible brain bleed before we address the person with a finger laceration that needs sutures. Highly trained and competent humans do this in their heads now, and it works generally well, but the efficiency and accuracy of that thought process can be affected by a lot of things ranging from a distracted ED physician because he is getting divorced, to a flood of trauma cases coming in.
Additionally, what might not appear to be a patient you need to examine right away could actually be a ticking time clock due to a variety of unseen things, medical history buried in the chart that is not seen, or factors in the patient's present state where the patient is heading for an unexpected crash, even though the patient is smiling at you from their chair in the waiting room.
There are various ways AI could be leveraged to help in the triage process. That smiling patient may have a complicated medical history that no human has taken the time to comb through, never mind correlating various factors that to a normal, even highly skilled ED doc, may be completely unknown. Using AI and deep learning to look for patterns unseen by humans (or not obvious to them) could generate a pick-list of priorities for the ED personnel that would use as a simple starting point.
The key is, AI and Deep Learning would used to assist a human, not make the decision. So AI has great promise in that respect.
But like all tools, there is a duality to it. In the same way that a hammer can be used to build a beautiful cabinet or to bash in someone's head, AI can be used for many useful things, as well as many bad or even evil things, as Google alludes to in its "Selfish Ledger" video.
I explain my deep concern about Google to people this way:
If you go to a library, and you ask the librarian for a specific book, she might offer (in her role as a librarian) to find it for you.
But instead, she returns with a completely different book which she fully expects you to accept instead of the one you asked for.
And when questioned, she says you are too young for that book, it was written by a 'disreputable' person, it has bad ideas in it, or...she simply thinks you should read the book she brought back for you instead, since that is more 'appropriate' for you.
Some people might scoff at that, but in defense I draw on Bill Whittle's criticism of Google based on their leaked internal video called The Selfish Ledger.
This video, not intended to be seen by other than the top executives at Google, was leaked to the public by an unknown employee.
Bill Whittle did a masterful video recently called The Stolen Election Part II: Stoners and Reptiles
The whole video is worth watching, but his interpretation and presentation of the Big Tech interference in the election is critical. Near the end, if you go to the 14 minute mark of the video, he discusses a video, created for top level Google executives (and meant only for their eyes) that was leaked to the public called "The Selfish Ledger".
Bill Whittle calls it the most frightening thing he has yet seen from the Left, and I agree with him.
It describes how Google views our "ledger" to be compiled by the compilation of our online activities into a "fingerprint" of who and what we are, and likens it to our DNA that identifies us, and how they wish to alter that DNA-like "Ledger" to manipulate people to "think the right way".
Chilling. Even though you sound like you understand this aspect of Google fully, I highly recommend it.
In the end-while I like to ponder the positive aspects of AI, I believe that the use for evil has far more negative ramifications in the service of evil and tyranny, and the voices wishing to discuss those are simply ignored as modern-day Luddites by starry-eyed people who think AI is going to save us.