AI

On The ABR Podcast this week, Robyn Arianrhod reviews Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari. Under the category ‘information networks’, Harari puts oral stories, clay tablets, chalkboards, newspapers, computers and more. Arianrhod writes: ‘Harari aims to illustrate these dilemmas so that we … are better prepared to handle the AI revolution’. Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics and the author of Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation. Listen to Robyn Arianrhod’s ‘Out of the loop: Relaying information across time’, published in the November issue of ABR.

It was a busy day in February. I was in my office at Monash University, squeezing in some emails with one hand and a quick bite of lunch with the other. Yeah, a typical day for an academic. That’s when I came across an email sent to me by a PhD student from another Australian university who wanted to know about a research paper I had written. They sent me the title of the paper, the abstract, and the author list. 

We like to think that we would stick up for ourselves after being wronged. No one wants to be a coward. Often, though, faced with the realities of power, wealth, and superior resources, we shrink from the good fight. More worryingly, humans can misdiagnose or externalise an issue, rationalising it away. We take a problem grounded in interpersonal relationships, politics, or some other social arrangement, and convince ourselves it is an objective, natural state of being. After all, as distinguished artificial intelligence researcher and author Toby Walsh, author of Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI, says: ‘We are, for example, frequently very poor at explaining ourselves. All of us make biased and unfair decisions.’