What I don’t like about A. I. 🤖

There is a lot of criticism of Artificial Intelligence on grounds that it uses a lot of electricity or that it will take all of the jobs or that it will lead to the singularity and lead to machines taking over the world. But those aren’t the criticisms I find most persuasive – it’s that AI is highly centralized, controlled by a handful of corporations and easily regulated by the government. It’s expensive and it’s true power can be held in the few, artificial intelligence by definition as it is currently implemented is highly elitist and anti-democratic.

Personal computers are continuing to get much more powerful. Some smaller limited capacity artificial intelligence models can operate on them. Indeed, I have very little fear of AI that is locally run and is open source that anybody can download and use for free. Anybody can study the code, make modifications and use as they please with open source, locally run artificial intelligence. Governments and corporations can’t control that form of AI.

However much of what is AI currently isn’t that form – much AI used locally uses a network to connect to that distant government and corporation controlled data centers. And that’s dangerous as government and corporations can limit access at any time or raise prices dramatically. The reliance on external AI services also feeds the corporate and government surveillance networks. Most of the free AI services just feed your data into advertising networks, if not to police surveillance networks.

Web services and APIs sure are convenient. But also incredibly dangerous. They can disappear at any moment, data altered or censored invisibly. Things you do locally using downloaded data and open source software are not only usually faster, they are far more secure and reliable. Nobody can take away something you have locally, and if the open source software uses common libraries and follows the standards it’s likely very future proof. And it’s not leaking your private information right into the hands of corporate and government surveillance networks.