Given the exponential growth of the artificial intelligence market throughout 2023, questions regarding the limits of technology and its impact on human life arose.
Throughout history, the industrial revolutions have evidentiated the impact that the emergence of technological innovations has on human behavior and organization. When incorporated into the media and the workplace, the influence of these technologies is extended to multiple aspects of human life.
Accordingly, the popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) alters the configurations of human society as it becomes increasingly accessible to a wide range of individuals. Therefore, conversations regarding the ethical regulation of AI play a pivotal role in defining how much artificial intelligence will shape humankind in the future.
AI in The Workplace
With the enhanced circulation of artificial intelligence, several possibilities regarding its instrumentalisation arise. Various modernizing processes have allowed for the use of technologies as a means to improve the human condition—an extension of our innate abilities, beyond the deficiencies of mankind.
Similarly, AI can be applied in numerous areas in order to reduce the excessive workload of individuals through systems that carry out some of their tasks, such as planning and organization. From this perspective, the use of artificial intelligence would supplement human needs through an application that redirects human labor towards more efficient functions that takes into consideration emotional intelligence, which technology lacks.
During the second episode of the Global AI Summit podcast “How AI is affecting human lives”, Philip Torr, an engineering professor at Oxford University, said, “I think it’s becoming apparent that AI will permeate every aspect of society. It will make us efficient. It will give us the tools to allow us to work and improve pretty much any area of human endeavor.”
However, a less optimistic perspective regarding the usage of AI in the job market permeates the popular consensus. A material example of this growing fear was the recently-ended Hollywood strike, in which actors and screenwriters protested in favor of labor rights and specific regulation regarding Artificial Intelligence.
Among the main causes of the SAG-Aftra Strike, there is a disagreement with the unrestricted use of AIs by Hollywood’s movie studios. A significant contractual resolution of the strike is the demand for consent from actors—or their heirs—whenever their image is used to generate digital replicas, including the use of their image to manufacture “fake synthetic actors”.
This perspective could emanate from the implementation of new technologies by large corporations. In the past, automation and robotization processes were among the main causes of structural unemployment. The absence of labor bills that regulate the insertion of machines into the workplace resulted in the replacement of human labor. On that account, it becomes crucially important to draft laws that ensure the rights of the working class in the face of large-scale technological advances.