Sometimes we would like to control everything with artificial intelligence (AI) and data collection, in order to reduce risk as much as possible. But aren’t we banishing chance and luck from our lives?
Take the Paris Olympics, which kicked off last week. In many areas, the French government installed a panoply of surveillance cameras equipped with detection algorithms to generate alerts for suspicious behavior. Despite the controversy that accompanied this decision, who could legitimately oppose it, given the importance of the terrorist threat on French territory?
In Olympic stadiums and swimming pools, judges are now equipped with AI systems to help them make decisions when faced with ambiguous results. Which athlete made the most perfect move? Where exactly did the ball bounce? If we want to be truly fair and impartial, why deprive ourselves of the expertise of algorithms that see and calculate better than we do?
But this is nothing new. The Paris Olympics are just one manifestation of the growing influence of algorithmic management on our ways of thinking and acting. We ourselves are increasingly inclined to rely more on predictive AI than on human beings to make decisions that determine our lives.
While some people turn to digital apps to find the right partner rather than engage in random encounters, others choose to hand over their data to genetics companies to assess their health risk factors. If you do neither, like me, you might as well ask yourself how easy it is to trust the response of a conversational agent like ChatGPT.
And beyond individuals, public and private organizations are not left behind. The imperative is now to collect as much data as possible to analyze and predict in order to better anticipate and act. This is what we call organizational resilience driven by artificial intelligence. And in this perspective, workers should also use AI to be more efficient, while making fewer mistakes. This is a commendable project in many ways, especially if it is employees who primarily benefit from this productivity gain.
But faced with the promise of an AI that constantly increases our skills, have we forgotten that human beings remain essentially fallible beings who evolve in an uncertain world? And, above all, that these apparent “flaws” of humanity actually constitute the basis of our sensitivity and our unpredictability, two guarantors of the maintenance of chance and luck in our existence?
Although I have devoted almost my entire life to training many audiences in AI, I cannot stop observing how the non-reflexive and systematic use of technology is changing us. Especially in our relationship to the world and to others. Banishing risk and uncertainty through technology could well become an individual and collective priority in a world focused on the continuous collection and analysis of data, in order to know and predict everything.
But what kind of society do we want in the future? For my part, I would like to preserve my freedom to choose a life without prediction or technological recommendation. A life not necessarily disconnected, but certainly more random and open than an algorithm would predict from all my data. And you, do you still have a taste for risk and uncertainty in the era of AI?