ARTIFICIAL intelligence has exploded in popularity in workplaces and education in the last 12 months, but some prominent thinkers are warning against its adoption on ethical grounds.
That was the topic of discussion at the latest Assembly of Catholic Professionals in Brisbane this week.
More than 200 professionals were led through the dangers and opportunities for AI by industry leaders like ACU Queensland Bioethics Centre director Dr David Kirchhoffer, Queensland Government chief customer and digital officer Chris McClaren and University of Sydney Human Technology Institute director technology Professor Sally Cripps.
The conversation was moderated by ACU PM Glynn Institute director Dr Michael Casey.
Dr Kirchhoffer said the greatest hope for AI was it enabled humans to do things better that “we’re okay at, but not great at”, and it enabled us to “do things that we don’t want to do”.
He said the aged care sector was an area that AI could be effective, where it could relieve pressure on an overburdened workforce and provide better medical monitoring.
The greatest challenge for AI, he said, was the risk that biases and injustices could become institutionalised into the system and – because of the speed with which AI works – create bad outcomes quickly.
He said this risk could become cataclysmic when we talk about scenarios such as AI in the military.
For Prof Cripps, her greatest hope was that AI could help us understand our world better.
She said advances in sciences, be they physical sciences, life sciences or social sciences, would help to address a range of issues.
She hoped by engaging humans, especially experts and frontline workers, the AI systems we build could reflect the community experiences.
Her “doom and gloom world” is one where “we are living in Big Brother world, where we have no privacy anymore”.
She said when you attend a sports game and you are captured on candid camera, your face is processed with facial recognition technology and that data is then sold to companies who want to understand who attends what.
“You probably don’t know,” she said, “But you sign it away at the bottom of the ticket.”
AI would supercharge these capabilities, she said.
Mr McClaren had great hopes for AI and hoped that everyone embraces it.
“We’re really just scratching the surface of the capability of some of these tools and innovations that have been developed,” he said.
He pointed to applications being made in the Japanese schooling systems where young students can learn to read from books that adapt their text on the fly to suit their reading level.
In terms of his fears, he said he had “not many in the short term”, and believed more empirical data would be required before AI could be regulated properly.
Prof Cripps agreed with Mr McClaren and said AI could be called, “applied statistics”, and the level of fear around it would decrease.
She said while Chat GPT and other programs like it might seem intelligent, it is not intelligent.
She said large language models like Chat GPT simply were trained to guess the next word in a sentence and, because it ingested so much data, it became so proficient at guessing the next word that it appeared intelligent.
To find out more about the Assembly of Catholic Professionals, please visit: https://catholicfoundation.org.au/events/join-the-acp/
