This House Believes That Artificial Intelligence Will Do More Harm Than Good

I was invited to speak at the Glasgow University Union Show Debate. I have little experience in debating, and have even less experience in UK's political system, except I know that debating is an important part of it. However, I feel I do have something to say for this topic, about AI, so I agreed. I decided to take the goverment's side, and below is the speach I made in the debate show.

Rollo May, a co-founder of humanistic psychology, once said: “Every organism has one and only one central need in life, to fulfill its own potentialities…If we fail to do it, we will become sick. If we do not walk, our legs will wither, the flowing of our blood, and the action of our heart will become weaker.” This has already been happening in today’s work, which is mostly computer-facing and sedentary, without much use of our body potentialities. This has caused a lot of health issues. Research shows that the risk of colon cancer has been related to sedentary work. Now with more AI used in our work, I am afraid we are going to see more and more of this kind of risk to our health and wellbeing.

I believe many of us who are sitting here today would identify us as knowledge workers, or knowledge workers to be. We consider ourselves knowledgeable, intelligent, analytical, and creative. We are good at processing information, analyzing data, finding insights, applying knowledge, designing systems, and creating new solutions. They are our potentialities and we are fulfilling them, and by doing that we find our work and our lives meaningful. This is an inherent part of our identity, and we are proud of it.

However, more and more AI demonstrates similar qualities, knowledgeability, intelligence and creativity, and many times, they can even do the knowledge work in a more efficient and cost effective way. A recent survey shows that more than half of firms in the US are turning to AI to replace humans to do some of the knowledge work automatically, to cut costs and boost profits. It seems, very soon, not simply our body potentialities, but also our brain potentialities, will be automated away.

Now imagine more and more work will rely on AI to pull insights from large data in a more efficient and cost-effective way. What is left for us to do then? If there are still jobs, instead of doing the analysis, we will probably need to take over the more boring and mundane part of the work that AI cannot do, such as manually processing, annotating, cleaning and preparing the data to feed AI for analysis. Rather than generating a report and designing ourselves, what is left for us to do is probably to manually check and spot any errors in the report produced by AI. In the end, AI is doing more and more high-value jobs. We, as human beings, will do more and more boring and low-value work, in order for AI to use their intelligence and creativity to do the work that used to be your capability and strength. Is this a kind of job you are looking forward to? Will you find it meaning in doing that kind of job? How shall we find self-worth and esteem?

Now some might argue that, well, one of the strengths of AI is its efficiency and productivity, so we could have more time for ourselves, enjoy our lives, and feel self-worth beyond work. How naive this idea is! Based on what is happening with the rapid development of IT, we all know that this is not going to happen. With more efficient and productive machines integrated into our system, rather than having more time for ourselves, we will be forced to live up to their pace, and forced to become more productive and efficient. We’ve already seen the trend brought by IT. Today, we, in academia, are more productive than ever in producing papers. For instance, for the top conference in HCI, CHI, every year, there is more than 25% increase in submissions. We are so productive that it has become very challenging to find reviewers to review these papers. More and more conferences and journals are experiencing a reviewer crisis. We cannot find quality reviewers to review all these papers. As a result, the quality of published work is going down, and the quality of the conferences is going down. The whole community is becoming more and more unsustainable. To some extent, the machine is like a spinning wheel and we are like gerbils. With the machine running ever faster, we will have to run ever faster on it. Is this the world you want to live in? It is certainly not the world I want to live in!