{"id":359596,"date":"2021-10-28T19:20:55","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T16:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/what-does-artificial-intelligence-mean-for-our-world\/"},"modified":"2021-10-28T19:20:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T16:20:55","slug":"what-does-artificial-intelligence-mean-for-our-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/what-does-artificial-intelligence-mean-for-our-world\/","title":{"rendered":"#What does artificial intelligence mean for our world?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#What does artificial intelligence mean for our world?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n A new course at McMaster University is diving into the societal implications of artificial intelligence\n <\/div>\n
\n While studying cancer biology as a health science<\/a>s student at McMaster University in 2016, Andrew Leber started to wonder how artificial intelligence might help diagnose and improve cancer treatments. He brought together 10 friends, also science students, for a reading group focused on technical concepts in machine learning.<\/p>\n

But it turned out many more students were interested. Leber and friends opened the reading group to a wider audience, and within a month it had 50 members. A few months later, Leber launched the McMaster AI Society, which blossomed into one of McMaster University\u2019s largest student-run clubs. The group received a sponsorship from Microsoft and has since grown to more than 1,000 members, many of whom are from faculties such as business, the humanities and social<\/a> sciences.<\/p>\n

One of them is Sarah Bowron, a third-year sociology student, who was concerned about the legal landscape and privacy implications of AI: \u201cWhat are the privacy boundaries? How is [AI] impacting people in ways that we really don\u2019t know about?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Early on, the club\u2019s popularity caught the attention of an engineering faculty member, who floated the idea of creating a new undergraduate course. Leber led the committee to develop the course, and Innovate 1Z03 is now offered through the university\u2019s innovation minor program, a collaboration between the faculty of engineering and the DeGroote School of Business. It\u2019s a bit of a departure from typical AI courses that are available through computer science and engineering departments in Canadian universities, which tend to teach algorithmic techniques to program and analyze AI rather than the societal implications. Instead, Innovate 1Z03, and other new interdisciplinary courses at the University of Toronto, are teaching AI as both an art and a science.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudents are going into a world where they hear about AI all the time,\u201d says Matthew Jordan, the professor who teaches Innovate 1Z03. \u201cThis new technology<\/a> is going to be a fixture of their life, and it\u2019s over-hyped and misunderstood.\u201d Throughout the semester, Jordan\u2019s students reflect on how AI is presented in news<\/a> headlines and wrestle with questions such as: how close is AI to reaching human-level intelligence? Is AI replacing the need for human labour? Is AI in fact a new technology? (Spoiler alert: the field has existed for 75 years.)<\/p>\n

For one assignment, students assume the role of a CEO of a global AI company and work in teams on a roadmap for the AI industry or to develop a new AI app<\/a>lication. Akil Hamilton, a fourth-year software engineering student, designed a virtual assistant for physicians to offer customized treatment recommendations based on a patient\u2019s experience. Hamilton says a problem emerges when AI algorithms are shown or \u201ctrained on\u201d data from an overrepresented demographic group. For example, if an image recognition algorithm is trained on more light-skinned faces than dark-skinned faces, the AI would be better at detecting light-skinned faces. \u201cIf we are looking to give an accurate health-based recommendation, [this kind of algorithmic bias] is something we will need to overcome,\u201d Hamilton says.<\/p>\n

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At the University of Toronto, Karina Vold teaches two courses that encourage students to think about AI like philosophers. In The Limits of Machine Intelligence, students unpack hidden assumptions about the concept of \u201cintelligence,\u201d stepping back to reflect on what it means to consider something \u201cconscious\u201d or \u201cintelligent\u201d in the first place. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s a dream-shattering course,\u201d says Vold, because there\u2019s an idea that AI has the potential to exhibit human-level thinking or self-awareness. But in Vold\u2019s course, the takeaway is often, \u201cHey, AI is not there yet. But here\u2019s why,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In many ways, these new interdisciplinary AI courses are both sobering and illuminating, putting in the foreground the importance of deep, critical thinking, a long-valued skill in the liberal arts. \u201cIt would be a harm for us as a society to let a technology be built that has such a widespread impact without having some critical reflection on what that impact is, and without trying to really understand it,\u201d Vold says.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the 2022 University Rankings issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cMachines are us?\u201d <\/em>
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