I think one of the key things I took from the Ben Shneiderman video is that not everything is A.I. Although this seems obvious, as Shneiderman points out, there’s often a linguistic issue when it comes to “A.I.” and what the general public thinks A.I. is. To use other things we’ve touched on in class, people tend to think that devices that use statistical or simulative algorithms for prediction must be some sort of A.I. This synthesization of all algorithmic machines as being A.I. adds to our dystopian fears of machine learning, and although this may not hinder the advancement of machine learning, a perpetual cycle of distrust of A.I. amongst the general public is created. Again, this idea is not inherently “new” information, but I think it’s something that could be talked about more even in spheres outside of technology. Doing so would both break this perpetual cycle and help people rethink the roles of machine learning in our daily lives.
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This is a very good point and one that I didn't give enough thought while watching the videos. I think you are very correct in saying that education of what is and isn't AI to the general public is paramount in order for our society to continue to incorporate and benefit from it. It seems to me that AI has become a sort of umbrella term to the general public for anything that has to do with technology or science that someone does not understand. And, like you said, this is almost certainly where all of the fear of AI in the public stems from.
It is interesting to think about the distinction between an AI and a computerized simulation. I think a lot of skepticism about the use of AI and simulation has to do with the general distrust of the companies that are associated with extensive use of both types of technology (Big Tech and advertising). I think that anthropomorphizing computers to believe that they would independently generate nefarious schemes to hurt people is also an issue that is a function of either not understanding the fact that computers "think" in a fundamentally different way from people or not understanding that even AI cannot operate outside of its preprogrammed parameters.
Yes — it’s so important to distinguish AI from other techniques (e.g. regression analysis), but that importance is lost on many.