Distinguished speakers delve into implications of AI

What constitutes the immense promise yet unsettling implications of AI — such an impactful term that almost no one needs to spell out “artificial intelligence” to understand the reference?

Technologist Nicholas Thompson and neuroethicist Nita Farahany probed AI in a bracing 90-minute program before an attentive audience in the Distinguished Speakers Series address Nov. 16 in the Center for the Arts Mainstage Theatre. The presentation combined conversation between the principals with a traditional lecture format.

Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and former editor of WIRED, said he’s “obsessed” with AI for reasons that include how it can foster creativity among his three boys. He described a book he made for them using AI tools, “Animal World Cup,” a story about soccer games between different animals based on their stuffed animals. “I think it is the most important thing that has been invented in their lifetimes and will profoundly shape the world we live in,” he said. Yet Thompson also cited AI’s “profoundly disruptive” impact on his own media industry and the far-reaching implications for everyone, no matter their workplace.

“AI is great at lots of things. You can write hilarious poems; it can help with the Animal World Cup books,” Thompson said. “Ask it to tell you a joke — it’s not good. There are certain limitations. You can beat us in chess but can’t beat us in poker. What are the limitations? What are the things it can do? What are the things it can’t do? How should we regulate it?”

Farahany, author of “The Battle for Your Brain” and a legal scholar and ethicist at Duke University, showed a cartoon video in which an employee’s thought patterns can be detected and interpreted unsympathetically by the boss; for example, fantasizing over a co-worker when romantic fraternization is forbidden.

Farahany outlined an especially frightening scenario: “The government has subpoenaed employees’ brainwave data from the past year. They have compelling evidence that one of your co-workers has committed massive wire fraud. Now, they’re looking for his co-conspirators. You discover they’re looking for synchronized brain activity between your co-worker and the people he has been working with. While you know you’re innocent of any crime, you’ve been secretly working with [the target of the investigation] on a new startup venture. Shaking, you remove your earbuds.”

Most people would not want such a happenstance for their future. But many may not realize that such occurrences “are nearly here,” Farahany said. “That’s because AI is transforming everything — about what it means to be human, but also unlocking some of the secrets and the mysteries from datasets — huge datasets for many different fields, including neurotechnology.”

Her particular interest is consumer neurotechnology, which entails “brain sensors in everyday devices that can interpret, decode and understand the patterns of brainwave activity.” She showed an image of her own brain activity recorded while she was wearing a simple headband with electroencephalography (EEG) centers that can pick up and detect basic brainwave activity.

In the past, such imagery wasn’t all that telling, she said. “We had some rough idea about what these patterns of lighting up in the brain meant. But you couldn't actually tell what I was thinking or feeling. Now, thanks to advances in AI, and the miniaturization of this technology, it’s now possible to do things like tell whether a person is happy or sad, if they're engaged or bored, or if their mind is wandering or paying attention.”

Especially important while AI developments are looming, Farahany said, is to create safeguards for our “cognitive liberty,” which she describes in her book as “a bundle of rights that includes freedom of thought, the right to self-determination, and the right to mental privacy over our thoughts and mental processes.”

Notwithstanding the need for protective, privacy-ensuring measures, Farahany extolled AI’s promise to foster early detection of debilitating neurological maladies. “In the near term, these wearable brain sensors could transform some of the grim statistics, like the fact that more than a billion people worldwide struggle with mental health and drug use disorders. The everyday use of brain sensors could enable us to finally have the data, the longitudinal data, the everyday, real-world data that could reverse those trends. Take the 55 million people around the world with dementia. More than 60% of those people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, or the 300 million people suffering from depression. Suddenly, with insights that we can have by treating our brain health as seriously as we treat the rest of our physical health, we can reverse the trends that are taking such a huge toll on society.”

Farahany described developments in electromyography (EMG), including Apple’s plans to embed EMG sensors into their AirPods, along with existing technology “to use eye-tracking data to make inferences about brains and mental experiences.”

In the second half of the program, Thompson posed a series of provocative hypotheticals drawn from Farahany’s book, along with audience questions submitted beforehand. The dialogue juxtaposed Thompson’s wry humor and down-to-earth manner with Farahany’s erudition and scholarship.

One hypothetical, for example, concerned a truck driver behind the wheel of a 40-ton rig who is surveilled for his fatigue level. “I think we can probably mostly agree that if the only piece of information that we’re extracting is your fatigue level, that’s a fair trade-off. We can violate your mental privacy for society’s interest in being safeguarded against a commercial driver [potentially falling asleep at the wheel],” Farahany said. “But when you start to say, ‘OK, well what about performance levels, or intelligence levels or, you know, maximizing productivity in the workplace?’ I don't think the risk benefit pans out.”

Asked what is the “mystery of the mind” that she would most like to solve, Farahany replied: “The deterioration of people who lose their minds to me is one of the most painful things to watch and one of the most frightening things for most of us to contemplate. So I would most like for us to figure out what’s causing those and how do we stop that? … Being able to look across huge datasets, starting to find those patterns that we can’t [now] see, and then being able, ideally with that information, to address it. I think that’s incredibly promising and incredibly hopeful.”

“That is a wonderful positive notice, and a good reminder that there’s a lot to worry about and a lot to protect against,” Thompson concluded. “There’s a lot of regulation you need and a lot of wonderful science that can come forward.”