Editorial | Discuss AI’s risks, too

It is not clear who, appropriately, should lead the discussion, Daryl Vaz, the science and technology minister, or Dana Morrison Dixon, the new Cabinet member whom Prime Minister Andrew Holness named as his czar for digital transformation.

Either way, the administration should urgently begin a serious national conversation on artificial intelligence (AI), including how Jamaica can take advantage of the emerging technologies, but with appropriate guardrails against the potential dangers of these new systems, some of which, some futurists believe, could pose existential threats to the human race. This issue has become so critical that Jamaica should have it placed high on the agenda of next month’s full summit of the leaders of the Caribbean Community, the regional trade and cooperation group that is attempting to transition into a genuine single market and economy.

AI technologies, of course, are not new. Prime Minister Holness has been a keen advocate of Jamaica’s need to embrace what is on offer as part of the island’s digital transformation and of its potential to leapfrog into a new phase of its development.

However, AI has recently received new levels of attention globally with the advent of artificial intelligence technologies such as the chatbot, ChatGPT, whose abilities not only closely match those of humans, but whose learning capacities are developing so rapidly that many people fear that, unchecked, they could eventually pose existential threats to mankind.

These issues, though, are not yet the subject of any substantial debate in Jamaica, where the focus is on the potential of AI to displace jobs, especially in the sprawling business process outsourcing sector, which employs over 55,000 people and grosses around US$900,000 annually.

PESSIMISTIC ASSESSMENT

The more pessimistic assessment, so far, says that up to 70 per cent of those jobs could be gone in five years. However, earlier this year, Anand Biradar, the president of the industry body, the Global Services Association of Jamaica, felt that the loss could be limited to 20 per cent over the next two years. The fallout, he suggested, was being cauterised by companies moving further up the food chain, to provide greater value added to their business models. Others downplay the likelihood of job losses altogether.

It is obvious, therefore, that the potential effects of AI on jobs and the economy is a critical question to be analysed and debated. Clearly, there is no turning back these technologies. And operating in a global economy in which they exist has implications for how Jamaica organises its education system, structures its labour market, and positions itself as a place to do business. For an industrial policy built around low wages and low technology, and engaged only in the marginal transformation of raw material and services will not, in the 21st-century metaverse, deliver sustained development or move Jamaica out of the ranks of middle-income developing countries anytime soon.

But, beyond the opportunities offered by AI to drive growth and development and the sheer advancement of humanity, these technologies also raise the spectre of ethical, social and political abuse, as is already being debated in other jurisdictions. Jamaica must join that discourse.

Should we believe that this is not a matter of concern, in April a group of technology leaders issued an open letter calling for a slowing-down in the development of super-intelligent AI systems, as well as their regulation.

RAISED CONCERNS

Even the bosses of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, have raised concerns about the potential dangers of the rapid, unregulated advance of the supersmart AI systems.

“It’s conceivable that within the next 10 years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains, and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations,” the company’s co-founders, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, and the CEO, Sam Altman, wrote recently. “In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past. We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there. Given the possibility of existential risk, we can’t just be reactive.”

The European Union (EU) already has draft legislation – signed off by its parliament last week – which will now be refined in negotiations between the legislators and commission.

The existential threats to humans may seem exaggerated and, at best, far off. But there are immediate issues, such as those raised by the EU’s commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, to which Jamaicans can relate.

“... I think the AI risks are more that people will be discriminated [against], they will not be seen as who they are,” Ms Vestager told the BBC.

“If it’s a bank using it to decide whether I can get a mortgage or not, or if it’s social services … [from] your municipality, then you want to make sure that you’re not being discriminated [against] because of your gender or your colour or your postal code.”

Jamaicans know well about the assumptions made about, and the discrimination faced by people based on their addresses – whether in finding jobs or accessing services in the public and private sectors. But the downsides of such biases being inherited by artificial intelligence may only be the tip of the iceberg, compared to the risks for fundamental freedoms – and democracy itself – if AI were to advance in a total absence of regulation. Put another way, human beings can enjoy AI’s benefits with sensible regulation of its downside risks.