With the Metaverse on the way, an AI Bill of Rights is urgent
There is a lot more than the usual amount of handwringing over AI these days. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put out a new book last week warning of AI’s dangers. Fresh AI warnings have also been issued by professors Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley) and Youval Harari (University of Jerusalem). Op-eds from the editorial board at the Guardian and Maureen Dowd at the New York Times have amplified these concerns. Facebook — now rebranded as Meta — has come under growing pressure for its algorithms creating social toxicity, but it is hardly alone. The White House has called for an AI Bill of Rights, and the Financial Times argues this should extend globally. Worries over AI are flying faster than a gale force wind.
The concerns point to shortcomings in existing AI implementations and the inherent dangers posed by its use in relation to employment, housing, credit, commerce, criminal sentencing, and healthcare. And yet, there are a multitude of significant advances brought about by AI that would otherwise not be possible — from revolutionizing our understanding of biology to saving energy in data centers, to becoming a new trusted source of career advice, developing computer code, identifying cancers in patients, and even opening up the possibility of communicating with other species. In these areas and more, AI is increasingly adding value to our experience and becoming interwoven into the fabric of daily life.AI is a classic double-edged sword in much the same way as other major technologies have been since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Burning carbon drives the industrial world but leads to global warming. Nuclear fission provides cheap and abundant electricity though could be used to destroy us. The Internet boosts commerce and provides ready access to nearly infinite amounts of useful information, yet also offers an easy path for misinformation that undermines trust and threatens democracy. AI finds patterns in enormous and complex datasets to solve problems that people cannot, though it often reinforces inherent biases and is being used to build weapons where life and death decisions could be automated. The danger associated with this dichotomy is best described by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson at a Harvard debate, where he said “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology.”
Where will our latest God-like technology take us?
Both authors also talk about how our species may evolve into something else entirely as AI gains in sophistication, where our bodies may no longer be necessary. In that eventuality, we would become purely digital consciousness. But how then would we act in the world? Futuristic literature introduces some possibilities. We might act purely in a digital realm as described by Neal Stephenson in Fall, or Dodge In Hell, where the consciousness of a person is uploaded onto a computer network and they’re still around in a sense. Or perhaps a person’s digital consciousness could be downloaded through the network into a robot as described by William Gibson in The Peripheral.
Add to this mix the potential of an “artificial friend,” an emotionally intelligent android as portrayed by Kazuo Ishiguro in Klara and the Sun. Or “digients” (short for “digital entities”), as described by Ted Chiang in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” where artificial intelligences that have been created within a purely digital world (much as the impending metaverse) inhabit a digital shared space with people where they can interact. In Chiang’s vision, digients too can transcend the digital to temporarily inhabit a physical body, and both move and act in the real world. When we consider multiple digital beings and realms, many relationship possibilities emerge between human and artificial intelligences. These possibilities and others made possible by AI point to the potential to transform life as we know it and create lifetimes of employment for ethicists.
Tech influencer Jon Radoff explains how the metaverse will be enabled, populated by, and supported with AI. This previously imaginary world is quickly becoming real with AI’s underpinning, moving from science fiction to fact. It is possible this could be a digital paradise, or the most addicting thing ever created. I am guessing the latter, a ubiquitous medium offering new ways to create, play, shop, socialize, and work online. Like any addiction, this could be a public health problem. Nevertheless, an array of companies are now getting ready for the metaverse; Meta of course, and also Microsoft, Nike, Dropbox, Nvidia, Niantic and more. New Zealand tech company Soul Machines is already creating “digital people” for the metaverse that have “teachable” digital brains. These sound a lot like digients and are being developed in part to become a digital workforce. What could go wrong?
Caption: Digital person created with “humanized AI.” Source: Soul Machines.
Is an AI Bill of Rights enough?
It is not only ethics experts who are expressing concerns about the metaverse and data privacy risks. Which comes back to the White House idea of an AI Bill of Rights to guard people against potential misuse and abuse of transformative AI technologies. With the EU and China moving in somewhat similar directions, the chorus calling for greater ethics and regulation of AI technology is growing louder. Even Russia recently developed an AI Code of Ethics. As if there were not already ample reasons to pursue these initiatives, the advent of the metaverse adds greater urgency. However, non-binding ethics discussions and codes are not enough.
It is possible that existing laws to protect privacy, for example, could be better applied and prioritized, and that an AI Bill of Rights is simply a distraction from their enforcement. An AI Bill of Rights is a good idea, but these rights are just words if they are not backed-up by statute. Hopefully, such a list of rights would provide the framework needed by agencies and legislatures to enact the administrative rules and laws needed.
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