Artificial Intelligence and Society: The Beautiful Promise and the Dystopian Threat

Advances in artificial Intelligence promise to bring a new era of prosperity. Self-driving cars, smart health care devices, and generative AI to automate mundane intellectual tasks are all on the horizon. But as society embraces AI, policymakers and industry leaders will need to address many practical and ethical challenges. 

AI can be influenced by past human biases, manipulated by hackers and criminals, or corrupted through various attack vectors, including data poisoning, malformed input, and model tampering. AI threatens to replace humans in many jobs and concentrate power and wealth among companies that most effectively integrate AI-enabled systems. For example, defense companies will increasingly incorporate AI in military systems like drones and precision missiles. Personal information can be either leaked or reconstructed from AI models’ training data, risking users’ privacy. Finally, face and voice recognition will make surveillance very efficient, allowing governments to track citizens in real time. 

Join Hudson Institute and Sanjay Goel, chair of the Information Security and Digital Forensics Department in the School of Business at the University of Albany, for a discussion on the future benefits, threats, and challenges that come with the rise of AI.