The Artificial Intelligence Contagion: Can Democracy Withstand the Imminent Transformation of Work, Wealth and the Social Order? - Softcover

Barnhizer, David; Barnhizer, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0999874772 ISBN 13: 9780999874776

Publisher: Clarity Press, 2019

Synopsis

Examines how AI/Robotics is overwhelming the fundamental institutions of Western society. But are we prepared for the social impact of the vast changes soon to be upon us?
• Half the world's workers could be replaced by machines within the next 30 years. The McKinsey Global Institute and Oxford University researchers predict massive job loss with 47% to 50% of US jobs eliminated by 2030 and up to 800 million more jobs destroyed worldwide.
• Nor will the AI/robotics transformation produce large numbers of replacement jobs. The AI/robotics systems are already being designed to do those.

No area of work is sacrosanct. Work opportunities are being eliminated from the most “intellectual” activities down to the basic areas of services and labor, including a range of professional occupations heretofore thought of as distinctly human: in middle management, finance, banking, insurance, medicine, high-tech, transportation, law and even the arts.

Worse, it is playing out in the context of a set of critical issues.
• Birth rates are plummeting below replacement levels in economically developed nations. People are living to ages wellbeyond historical averages.
• At least fifty percent of Americans have little or nothing saved for retirement.
• Poor and uneducated migrants are coming into Western nations at a time when the agricultural, construction and home care jobs migrants have traditionally filled are being increasingly replaced by robotic workers.
• An already bankrupt US government is projected to experience annual deficits above $1 trillion for at least the next ten years. The US national debt is officially admitted to be $21 trillion, but is actually closer to $65 trillion dollars according to a former US Comptroller General.

As AI/robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels―underfunded or non-existent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction―will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence . All this will take place in an environment of increased AI-facilitated surveillance by governments, aggressive militarization using AI systems and autonomous weapons, and the degradation of of the world;s economic and political order.
The final five chapters of CONTAGION offer possible solutions.

About this title

About the Authors

David Barnhizer is a Professor of Law Emeritus at Cleveland State University. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and worked in the International Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was Executive Director of the Year 2000 Committee, and consulted with the World Resources Institute, IIED, the UNDP, the President's Council on Environmental Quality, the World Bank, the UN/FAO, World Wildlife Fund/US. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from Ohio State University summa cum laude, and a Masters of Law degree from Harvard.

Daniel Barnhizer is the Bradford Stone Faculty Scholar at the Michigan State University School of Law.  He graduated summa cum laude from Miami University and earned a Juris Doctor degree, with honors, from Harvard. He works in tax, contract law and theory, conservation law, comparative law, and the Rule of Law

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1, Society Under Siege

With the combination of Artificial Intelligence and robotics (AI/robotics) humans have opened a “Pandora's Box” and are incapable of undoing the ills that are being released, with more coming seemingly by the day. The joining of Artificial Intelligence and robotic systems that are increasingly capable of acting more effectively than us in a wide range of work, surveillance, and information detection and management situations is the primary driver of a shift that is tearing our fracturing societies further apart.

Our political leaders have an extremely limited understanding of what is occurring with Artificial Intelligence and robotics, in terms of the elimination of massive numbers of jobs, and the potentially devastating impacts of these developments on the United States, Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Bill Gross, of Janus Capital, has warned: “No one in 2016 is really addressing the future as we are likely to experience it.” He explains: “the current crop of national leaders is hopelessly behind this curve…. Our economy has changed, but voters and their elected representatives don't seem to know what's really wrong.”

Artificial Intelligence applications and robotics are taking over our culture, altering how we behave and even who we are as addictions grow and our dependence on AI/robotics systems expands exponentially. Examples of our dependence are easy to
find. We are often required to pass tests for on-line access to various websites by answering the question “Are you a robot?” accompanied by numbers or specially constructed pictures designed to prove that we are flesh and blood humans to the AI application controlling the site. In the US we are flooded by billions of continuous “robocalls” and telephonic and e-mail scams made to seem as if a human is calling to the point that many do not answer their landline or discontinue service entirely.

Such things seem trivial or irritating but, when we think more deeply about what they portend, it demonstrates the penetration of AI/robotics into much of what we do, our heightened dependence on such systems, and the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate human from AI. Penetration, dependence and the difficulty of differentiation are developing rapidly. Recent reports on video and virtual reality technology indicate they are reaching a stage at which false images can be created that are impossible to distinguish from reality.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarity Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0999874772
• ISBN 13: 9780999874776
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 435