Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“My life – and yours – is being converted into such a data package that is then sold on. Ultimately, we are the products.”

copy text

“But AI is simultaneously affecting other, significant areas of our society: healthcare, policing, public welfare and military warfare, creating rippling consequences and lasting social change. It is altering the very experience of being human.”

copy text

“Deepfakes aren’t unintended consequences of AI. They are tools knowingly twisted by individuals trying to cause harm.”

copy text

“The face is a gateway between our internal and external selves, the part that represents us most publicly, yet defines us most intimately.”

copy text

“As the use of AI becomes widespread, its users must become wary of automation bias, a widely studied phenomenon in which people start to become over-reliant on automation to do their jobs. It’s the case with everything from self-driving cars to security cameras.”

copy text

“Ultimately, it all comes back to the humans at the heart of the process – AI can’t replace giving human beings agency to choose the fairest outcomes.”

copy text

“Empathy teaches us that everyone is flawed, yet still worthy of mercy. A risk score says the opposite: this is your digitally fixed reality, you have criminality inside you waiting to burst out. Your circumstances mean you don’t deserve forgiveness.”

copy text

“Within three days of launch, ChatGPT had crossed the threshold of a million users that its creators had predicted would be its peak. A few weeks later, that number was somewhere in the tens of millions. Six months in, estimates put its monthly user numbers at well over 100 million people. ChatGPT had burst out of its controlled lab environment and become one of the largest-ever social experiments.”

copy text

“If you were a motivated and intelligent criminal, you could probably still find a way to design dangerous chemicals and have them produced and shipped to you without the help of an AI model, but the software had dramatically brought down the barriers to committing such crimes.”

copy text

“My hope for AI isn’t that it creates a new upgraded species without the messiness of humanity, but that it helps us ordinary, flawed humans live our best and happiest lives.”

copy text